


A Bag Full of Dollars

by Blorcyn



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Different Powers, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:00:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 19
Words: 83,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25183663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blorcyn/pseuds/Blorcyn
Summary: A cape with no name has stolen millions in E88 cash, launching a manhunt that can have only one outcome. There’ll be blood in the streets of Brockton Bay. Braver girls would stay out of it. The only problem? The no name cape is Taylor.If she’s to survive, it’ll take all her smarts, as much time as she can scrounge, and the support of the city’s heroes. Too bad she’d rather do it alone.(Taking inspiration from the neo-Western genre, expect a Taylor who shoots from the hip.)
Comments: 30
Kudos: 42





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A/N, having passed 30k, it's probably reasonable for this to get a thread of its own. I enjoy the Dauntless gimmick and I read the few that are out there but still had the itch. This is not stations of canon, starting the day before Veteran's Day, 2010.

\------  
0.1

***** *****

In Manhattan, on 62 Reade Street in Tribeca, next to where the homeless guy sold Cannoli in summer with little success, Sal’s Authentic Stone-Bake Italian was closed. Wretch was inside, and he didn’t want to be disturbed. 

“Pepper?” 

He looked at his watch, readjusted his suit jacket. He turned both ways, looked at his power-created Made Men, where they loomed in front of walls covered with black and white pictures of The Family, back in simpler times, as if to check they were still there. 

“Who are you?” He didn’t let the waiter reply. “Do you not see that we are in the middle of a private conversation?” He flicked his hand dismissively. “No, I don’t want to talk to you. Where’s Sal?” 

The thin streak of nothing gulped loudly and a fat droplet of sweat traced his long face from temple to cheek. “I am Sal’s nephew, sir. There’s been some sickness.” 

“Wretch,” said a voice to the left.

His mask didn’t keep much visibility at the edges, the sides of the mask raised so it looked more menacing but the voice was Clip’s, one of the five Family capes who ran south Manhattan under him. He snapped his fingers at the waiter, letting him off, the boy wasn’t the real source of his irritation. 

“Clip,” he said. “Omerta says that youse have good news for me.” 

Omerta inclined her head, but said nothing, content to let Clip take the lead. He didn’t like that. Omerta was _his_ dog, and Clip had _ambitions_. 

Clip was theatrical, his black and white domino mask crinkled where he smiled. The man could swagger standing still. If not for his power, he wouldn’t be worth the irritation of dealing with in person. 

“Wretch. Boss, soon to be _capo dei capi_ , the associates have taken Tribeca. Uppercrust’s done. His hero team has put out a call for new corporate sponsors.” He raised a glass. “I give you Lower Manhattan.” 

A smile tugged at his lips. He’d sipped already but he raised his glass with the others, regardless. It _was_ good news, and it wouldn’t do to be sullen just because it was Clip saying it. It called for a brief speech, as much as he despised them. 

He waved a hand at Clip to sit. 

“Our Family has struggled, sidelined, irrelevant in the face of parahuman crime. We have been scorned, insulted, minimised. In our city. Where we grew up, where our kids and our grandkids will grow. We’ve got now what our Family hasn’t had since before the golden guy turned up—” There was a buzzing in his suit pocket. 

He looked back towards the hulking figures of his Made Men. They didn’t react, whatever it was had not gone through his work phones first. “And we’re not going to stop here now we’ve got Uppercrust and his tinkers on the run.” 

He raised his glass quickly, taking a quick glance at Consigliere while the others followed suit. His brother tapped the red and white check of the tablecloth with a gloved hand then tapped his own jacket breast. 

Wiseguy was touchy about phones at dinner. In their world, disrespect could kill faster than one of Omerta's poisons. Wretch covertly peeked at the bright screen inside the pocket of his silk-lining, trying to make out the caller ID: _Jacqueline_.

**SOS.**

It all dropped away. Not Jacqueline. Not his daughter. Without thinking, he was already out the door, plates and balsamic vinegar crashing to the ground behind him, tablecloth caught in his watch. Not Jackie. He said some words to Clip, gave orders to his brother and the rest of the Made Men, and waited in the bitter cold for the Phantom to pull up onto the sidewalk. Wretch shrank the three Made Men who ran after him with a touch so they all fit inside the vehicle.

“Get me to the apartment five minutes ago. Don’t worry about the cops. If you gotta drive on the sidewalk, do it!" The Phantom roared as it took off.

Wretch's calls to Jackie went straight to voicemail. His mind was full of images of her mother’s last moments. Unfortunately, now it was a waiting game. He thumped the driver's chair hard, urging him to ignore the red traffic light.

They reached the Lower East Side, and Henry Street not long after. High rise apartments, delis, trendy restaurants. He remembered a time this would’ve been Chinatown. Before the monster. The traffic hadn’t changed. “Go around him. Go around!”

His apartment came up on them like a tidal wave, the car screeching to turn onto the ramp. 

They spun down the ramp into the block’s underground parking. As they exited, he boosted the Made Men as far as he could without losing his edge. Their clothes tore at the seams, their faces distorted so that they looked more like timeworn statues than men. 

“You, with me. You two, get to the apartment. Find and protect my daughter.” They _moved_. It was still shocking, even to him, that brutes so big could move so quick. They were in the stairwell before he’d made it to the closer door to the lobby. 

Wretch’s oxfords clacked over the lobby floor and echoed back to him. Even with the heavy footsteps of the Made Man behind him, and his steely full-face mask, the concierge didn’t startle. He tipped his hat at Wretch, and called the elevator. 

“Good evening, Mr. Genovese.” 

Wretch turned his phone over in his hand, again, and again. “Any trouble in the Tower tonight? Have you seen my daughter leave, Art?” 

The doors opened with a soft chime. “No, sir. No trouble, and I’ve not seen Miss Genovese this evening.” 

Wretch grunted. “I’m not to be disturbed.” 

An uneasy nod was his reply. The elevator took several minutes to reach the top floor. The time was spent imagining all the worst and dreadful ways that his enemies might discover and trap his daughter. He was rigid and uncompromising in her safety, her existence his dearest secret. It was a Wednesday, and there weren’t after-schools, or boyfriends, or even sleepovers that he knew of today. She should have been chauffeured home. If she wasn’t at home he’d have no idea where she’d be, if she hadn’t been… taken. He steadied himself against the elevator bannister. 

He had two associates in the NYPD and one in the NYPRT. If she wasn’t home, he’d call them, and damn the deniability. Their positions weren't worth a thing if they weren’t made to work for him. 

The chime signalled the elevator doors opening onto soft carpet and a heavy steel door. 

The skyline of New York at night dominated the floor-to-ceiling window of the far wall. His heart was pierced by ice. Millions of dollars of marble worktops, fine sculptures and ‘never heard of them’ avant-garde portraits: worthless. She wasn’t downstairs. Where were his guys?

“Jackie! Jackie!” 

“Daddy, I’m here.”

He took the spiral staircase two at a time and saw her sitting stiffly in a black leather chair. In a triangle, one at each point, his Made Men were as soundless as usual. She found them creepy. She was in her pyjamas, her hair in a braid, and her laptop in front of her. There were no bruises, nothing out of order, she looked completely fine. She raised an eyebrow. 

“What. Can I help you and your little goons?”

He pressed his hands together, raised his head to the sky. Then he stepped past his men and slapped her laptop shut. He shouted until his face turned red. Passed English to Italian, like when she was a little girl, and her mother had been there to dry her tears. 

He caught his breath. One of his Made Men offered Jackie a box of tissues. Silent, as always. He looked at the silent giant sideways. Wretch wasn’t clear how much was left in there when he made them this big. 

“You mustn’t abuse Daddy’s trust, Jackie. Don’t cry wolf.” He folded his coat over one arm, before handing it off to another Made Man with a muttered order to take it downstairs. 

Jackie swallowed, pressing a tissue to her eyes where her makeup was running. “What have I done?” 

There was a tap on his shoulder. The Made Man who had followed him up in the elevator was handing him one of his phones. It was buzzing, continuously. Text message after text message. He opened the most recent. 

“Jackie, open your laptop, go to the Youtube. Do it.” 

He waved off her questions, and told her what to type in. The top video was a live feed from some cellphone in an apartment overlooking Sal’s. Smoke poured from broken windows. 

“Daddy, they’re saying it’s a bomb.” 

There was no sound, but the images kept playing fire licking at the outside walls. There was a man face down on the floor, unrecognisable from here. There weren’t any pigs there yet even, it must have happened only minutes ago. He screamed and dashed his work phone against the staircase. He reached into his pocket again for his personal phone and opened his texts. 

“Jackie, did you send me this?” He showed her the screen. 

She looked at him and shook her head, her eyes wide. “My phone got stolen today, before school. I was going to tell you.” 

He bowed his head for a moment, just a moment, as it hit him. “Jackie I need you to go to your room, get your things together. We’re going to send you to your aunt’s.” He looked at the largest of his Men. “You, stay with her. I’m going to have to go in to work. Becky’ll handle everything but _I_ will call you when everything’s ready.” He leaned over and kissed her on the head. Who knew when he would see her again. 

He went to the staircase and took the stairs down and she caught his eye as he disappeared. 

“Daddy, be careful,” she said, her eyes fixed on his. 

“ _Principessa,_ ” he said, and he slapped his chest with both hands, “I pushed back Barrow, I beat The Elite. Legend _himself_ couldn’t bring me in. Whoever this is took their shot, and they missed. Don’t you worry.” He looked out at New York. “Don’t you worry for _me_.” 

He passed through the kitchen to the study, flicking his fingers towards the elevator so that one peeled off to stand guard. He left the other outside the door. He never planned to discard a Made Man, but even they shouldn’t know all his secrets. 

The study was wood panelled, dominated by a large mahogany desk. Pictures of his family, and meetings with famous men across Family cities hung on the wall. A crystal ashtray weighted down loose papers in one corner. He took a key from inside his shirt and unlocked a drawer, pulling out a few small folders. 

It had to be The Elite that had misled him. He stopped searching through the papers for a moment. Had Uppercrust really conceded to _them_? The Elite operated in cells that were more loose-knit than the Mafia they aped. Very little of their wider league had come to help defend Uppercrust’s properties, very little did they seem to care for their oldest associate. He had thought Uppercrust had as much to fear from other cells as from him, but had he in fact struck down one head to face two more? 

A huge fist knocked on the study’s open door in warning. The sound of the elevator as it rose through the floors to the penthouse came from the lounge. Maybe thirty seconds of warning. The notes were stuffed into a briefcase and he picked his gun from the drawer, pushing it shut and locking it. 

Quick steps took him to the lounge, where the carpet gave way to the tiles of the kitchen. He covered his body behind a granite worktop that split the kitchen in half, shielded from the elevator. No ducking. He stood tall. He wanted to see who came out. 

His largest Made Man was there when the chime sounded. There was the moment of pause, then the mechanism gave a small noise and the doors opened. 

There was no one there. It was completely empty. 

“Check it out,” he called to his man. The giant stooped to enter, looked in the mirror, looked at the ceiling. There was a lurch. A slight give as the elevator slipped half a foot, just long enough for the Made Man to look at him for instruction with dull eyes, then a cannon crack as something snapped and he vanished from sight. The blood drained from Wretch’s face. Fuck. If he’d left the Made Man any room, had the power even a shade below its ceiling, the creature would have had enough initiative left to leap clear, and still have been quick enough to do it. It was no use crying over spilt milk. 

“On me, on me,” he called to the other man. The only one left, except the one with Jackie, upstairs. 

The crash of the elevator came half a minute later, still loud even this far away, almost palpable. “We need to take the stairs,” he muttered to himself. But clearly, if they had taken out the elevator then they _wanted_ him to take the stairs. He wouldn’t fall for it. With one Made Man and Jackie behind him he couldn’t chance it. Still, it wasn’t safe to leave her here. What was left? 

He turned to the great window behind him. There was a shadow and it shattered. Something struck him and he heard a crack as he fell backwards over the counter. His head smacked on the floor, and there was a blinding pain in his hip for a split second before it turned red hot, and throbbed. 

The gun was still in his hand. He seemed able to move his hands and feet, and he pulled himself into a crouch. 

“On me,” he croaked. There were no sounds of footsteps. He looked around and the apartment was spinning. There was blood coming from his scalp, over his eyebrows, half his view was red, and there were shards of not-glass all over the floor. Where was his Made Man? “On me,” he said, again. 

There was a crunch behind him, he spun and shot in one smooth motion, but his arm was blocked. A hand grasped his forearm and squeezed, and he dropped the gun with a clatter. Another hand took him by the neck, and he was lifted up and slammed down onto the granite worktop, hard. 

Something stabbed into his liver, a moment of shock then a blinding pain, and he screamed as it twisted inside. Another blade went through his hand, stabbing into the stone in one effort. The other hand was taken and pulled back, over his head. His wrist was broken in one movement. He screamed, the thrashing twisted the other knives. 

Footsteps sounded, heavy, slow footsteps, making their way around the kitchen to stand on the other side of his head. Above him, upside down from where he lay, his attacker leaned over him. The black full head mask speckled with red like a Pollock painting, the tall collar and long leather coat, his attacker was unmistakable. He stared down at Wretch, his breathing was soft but his eyes were bright. 

“You,” said Wretch. 

The attacker inclined his head. 

“You’re back in America. I’m flattered.” 

His vision didn’t seem so red anymore. All colour in the room seemed to be draining out of the edges of his sight. He strained to make sense of the ceiling. He had seen the egg-speckle white a million times but now it looked grey. 

His killer flicked the knife in his gut, there was something on the end of it now. A straw, or a hose. Blood was being sucked through it. He thought of Jackie. She didn’t have powers. Would he want her? Things didn’t seem to hurt so much any more. 

“It’s true then,” he mumbled, he flicked numb fingers towards the knife to show what he meant, and his tongue worked like he was drunk. “Who did they pay you for?” There was no answer. “All the capes, or...?”

He was sweating, and his heart was beating quickly. He could feel it racing like he’d just stepped off a treadmill. Jackie. He tried to sit up but there was something stuck, in his middle. Breathing didn’t seem to get enough breath. 

“My daughter,” he said, “Please, my daughter–” 

Bloodhound's knife paused. His voice was flat and refined, and soft like it was coming from very far away, across a distance on a day with no wind.

“You know who I am," he said. "You know what I do."  


***** *****


	2. Penumbral 1.1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Oh, I forgot to say, any and all help with Britpicking for wrong words, or more American ways to say things (or Worm slang where there's some of it) would be appreciated. I suspect there'll be more than I hope. Thanks in advance!

**1.1**

***** *****

I wasn’t one to escalate a situation if I could help it.

Old, slow and steady Taylor. Patient, push over Taylor. Taylor, wouldn’t hurt a fly, should probably roll over and die, Taylor.

When Mrs. Ridyard turned her back another spitball hit me in the hair. It had come from the left this time and Emma and Sophia were sitting to my right. Spitballs were more Madison’s thing so it must have been one of the boys who were interested in getting their approval. There was no way more convenient to do so than harass me, it seemed. Not since the start of tenth grade. I was dependable that way. You could count on me.

Pulling my hair to cover my face let me pull the soggy paper from my hair and hid my drawings. I had the slightest suspicion that, if my plan worked, my power would meet me halfway on what I was imagining. I looked at the elegant masquerade-ball costume I had sketched. Any improvement on the ramshackle homemade mess in my basement would be a step in the right direction.

We were called upon to read and, with Mrs. Ridyard facing us, the book of scribbled costume ideas was too risky to keep out. She had a tendency to prowl. I heard whispering and used the putting away of my notepad to glance in their direction, from the corner of my eyes I saw Sophia leaning towards Emma’s desk. They were both of them looking in my direction. Christ. I tried to open my fists. What was their problem?

Emma was whatever high school queen bee trope you’d care to name; beautiful with red hair and shoes that cost more than my whole outfit five times over, she was a part-time model and full time tyrant. Sophia was her track-star best friend. Together they had made the last year of school the worst year in my life and, having lost my mother a couple of years earlier, I felt ashamed to admit that even to myself.

Half the pain came from the mystery of it. Before she’d bonded to Sophia, Emma had been my best friend. We’d known each other since we were kids. Why had she turned on me? For a year I had wondered what Sophia had said, what she’d held over her to twist Emma and make her so different from who I knew she was. The longer that passed the more I was forgetting who was underneath the mask she wore now.

“Mrs. Ridyard, may I go to the bathroom?” asked Emma.

The teacher was surprised, but it was Emma so she smiled and gave her an ‘of course’. I stuffed the rest of my things into my bag. It was impulsive, I’ll admit that, I hadn’t thought about why she’d turned on me since the start of the school year but suddenly I was desperate to find out. I realised I hadn’t spoken to Emma alone since she’d turned on me, hadn’t seen her without her cronies listening in for months.

We had a one kid policy on toilet use so I darted to the door when Mrs. Ridyard’s back was turned. No-one said anything, possibly they were surprised, or possibly the invisibility that let them walk past Sophia’s punches and Emma’s taunting was working to my advantage.

The nearest bathroom didn’t have anyone in it. Maybe she had lied, maybe she had a boyfriend now, maybe she smoked, maybe she was a cape – a new Ward or the Empire’s Rune or someone. I found her in the third floor bathroom, where she was pulling a water bottle full of something that definitely wasn’t water from behind a sink.

The door closed behind me quietly. My heart was beating, my palms were sweaty. How was I ever going to take down a ganger, or fight a supervillain if my legs were turned to jelly by Emma?

“Emma,” I said.

She jerked, surprised. “Taylor,” she said. Then the mask came back and she stood, holding the bottle nonchalantly, her other hand on her hip.

“Don’t do that,” I said quietly, “this is your chance. Your one chance to tell me what happened to us.”

She laughed. “You’re pathetic,” she said, and I flinched. “I’ll see you after class.” She shook the bottle at me, and then made to pass me and leave. The door to the bathroom was one that swung inward and I put my arms out, blocking the way and keeping the exit shut.

“No, Emma.” Her eyes were the same as before, no different than when Sophia was whispering in her ear. Her mask was still up. “Talk to me. What made you hate me, or who? You owe me that.”

She smirked. The word gets overused, but this was a real one, designed in a lab to antagonise and aggravate. It worked. My legs weren’t jelly anymore.

“What the fuck, Emma. What’s your fucking problem?”

She laughed again, she turned away and leaned against the sink. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Someone pushed the door against my back.

“Occupied!” I called. Emma raised an immaculate eyebrow at me.

“This isn’t like you, Tay-tay.”

“This isn’t you at all,” I snapped. “What did Sophia do that made you like this? The Emma I knew was kind, and nice, and didn’t hurt people for the fun of it. You have done your best to fucking destroy me and I have taken it and waited for you to get over whatever is making you do this, don’t I deserve to know why? Is this some gang thing, or are you and Sophia dating, or—”

“Would you be jealous if we were? This is so rich. I can’t wait,” she spread her hands in the air like she was a Hollywood agent. “The dyke cornered me in the bathroom and said ‘it was jealousy all along’. I’m sure half the boys in school are going to be distraught they didn’t get to have their go.”

“I can’t be gay and a slut.” An old annoyance with their rumour spreading. Something twisted inside me, it was enough, it was all enough. It wasn’t a mask. For over a year, I had been completely wrong. I turned my ring about with my other hand. The power inside was coiled up tight; I still had no real idea what it did. Still, it reminded me that the school could only hold me down for so long. Emma was smiling like my reply was a point to her. “You’re pathetic,” I said. “You’re really pathetic, Emma, and I’m sorry for you. You might not see it yet, but you will.”

My eyes were stinging, but I couldn’t say I was sad, exactly. My words had landed though, and I could see that Emma’s face had paled, and little spots of red had appeared on her cheeks.

“I’m pathetic?” Her voice was level, but she was livid. “Me?” And she got close as she spoke, so that she was right in my face.

“I hate you, Taylor. You’re less than nothing to me, and that’s why I do it. You’re a cockroach, you’re a parasite. You’re the most pathetic, disgusting, ugly thing I’ve ever met and the world would be a better place if you weren’t here. Every day you turn up here you spit in my face. Every day I see you is a reminder that you leached years of my life from me, used me, stole from me. And I am going to spend every day making sure that you get that until you’re gone.”

She clumsily tore the lid from the bottle of red stuff, her hands were shaking I saw, and I slapped it out of her hand before she could pour it on me. Otherwise, I said nothing. I wouldn’t do her the dignity of responding, not to this monster, this person I didn’t know.

The stuff in the bottle was noisily glugging out onto the bathroom tiles. She stared at me, and I stood in front of the door.

“You’re pathetic,” she said, once more.

When I didn’t move, she slapped me, hard. Right in the cheek. I hissed, and the slap made me step sideways, but I didn’t say anything. It was enough that she could grab the door handle and pull it open and escape.

The bell rang.

I was there for a few minutes more, as the tingles in my cheek faded away. She was wrong. The world wouldn’t be better without me. It was important to me, that knowledge, and there was one certain way to prove it.

I was going out tonight, a month ahead of schedule. I was going to be a hero. An early start was probably inevitable. Even as a kid I’d never been able to wait until Christmas when I wanted something.

***** *****

It was nearly six by the time I made it to the Boardwalk. Sewing on the buttons and testing my costume had only taken ten minutes, but I had then waited a couple of hours for my dad to come home, and waited, and waited.

With tomorrow being Veterans Day, he had eventually called to say that he and his Union buddies were going out, but that he would be back before late. The irritation of the lost hours must have come through in my voice, because the more adamant I was that he stay out as long as he wanted the more he pushed back.

I have to be back for ten, I thought, to be safe. Just a quick practice, a chance to get my face seen. Well, my mask.

I took the steps down to the beach. In November, there was practically no one there. I waited till a solitary dog walker was further down the coast before I crossed the open. On the beach there were changing huts, in little rows of five, scattered all along the length of the long esplanade. They were painted in a variety of bright colours and they, and the Rig, were always on the front of the postcards that showed Brockton Bay’s few attractive features.

I looked at the Rig, the sun had set completely now, only a slight hint of pink still peaking out from behind Captain’s Hill; in the late twilight its iridescent forcefield reflected rainbows on the sea. The Rig was the home of Brockton Bay’s Protectorate. The Protectorate were one of the two government superhero teams, the adult one. They had some of the strongest superheroes in the world but here in Brockton Bay the heroes were outnumbered. They could use my help.

In the beach hut I took my costume out of my school bag, and put my umbrella down to one side. It was a mess, for now. There were three ways to make a costume. The first was to buy one or have it made for you, if you were rich or in a team. I was neither, and it seemed a risky thing to buy online and jeopardise your secret identity. The second was to assemble one from independent parts and hope it looked good, the problem being that it rarely did. The last, and best, was to make it yourself. Normally that was for tinkers or other powers like that. The Frankenstein’s Monster in my hands was definitely a number two, in all senses of the word.

I had made it by stitching together some dark sweatpants, a workman’s belt, a dress shirt, and a dark purple Chinese style sleeveless vest over the top of the shirt. The high white collar attached to a balaclava that I had cut eye holes in. For a bit of distinctive superhero flair, I had attached a half-mask over the top of the balaclava. Venetian, its edges were decorated with golden leaves, and the substance of the mask was a blended pinky-purple, not miles away from the colour of my vest. Its eyes were yellow where I had glued my old goggles lenses. It lent the costume a little seriousness, I felt, which it sorely needed.

As soon as the last button was fastened, the current to the costume resumed. My power had two parts to it. Most of the time it felt like a block in my chest, full of moving crystal pieces, growing and stretching and always turning. As it moved it generated an energy, a cold, oily feeling that stretched out through my veins. Without an object to direct it into the energy built up and I was left feeling half a coffee away from shattering into pieces. On the other hand, I could support about four at a time before I lost the strength to stand up. With the addition of the costume and my umbrella in hand, I was at my limit, I felt like I’d not slept well for a week.

I stepped back out onto the stony shore of the Bay, and used the second part of my power. When I had held an object for long enough, and it had improved far enough, it developed a resonance with the power in my centre. I could pluck at it and the object would change. I plucked at them all now and they changed.

The ring on my finger turned to dark purple-crystal. I couldn’t make my mind up, I thought sometimes that there were flickers of something else, like a shadow of a ripple underwater. The umbrella did the same, a more solid crystal full of a dense dark smoky-purple. My sneakers were different, they turned to shadow. A dark translucent outline, weightless and silent when I moved, covering my feet. At first the transformation had only been able to last several minutes. Now, for my ring and sneakers at least, it lasted until I turned it off, and my Umbrella wasn’t far off, managing most of the day on the last weeked that I had tested it.

I put my backpack underneath my vest and hoped it didn’t make me look too hunchbacked, then climbed the stairs to one of the Boardwalk’s piers.

This was what it was for. I spun my umbrella in one hand, though it looked more like a club now, and took slow steps along the boardwalk. Brockton’s boutique tourist trap extended over a mile along the coast from where I was now down to Downtown. It was in that direction I headed now.

I waved at a woman and her daughter, and was a bit offended when she clutched her child closer and hurried by.

It wasn’t busy, and at this time of year there weren’t many of the performers that would fill the area in summer. Nor quite so many enforcers. I saw one behind the window of Piotrs, dressed in black. He glowered at me and spoke into a walkie talkie.

I wasn’t too worried. The enforcers were mostly thugs hired to move teenagers on, and discourage shoplifters sharply. They wouldn’t tangle with a parahuman. Occasionally they’d have a Parahuman enforcer, but it would never stick. The last one had even gone on to join a team of teenage super thieves, I had read. Still, this close to the Rig, they didn’t need much to deter parahuman criminals. I bet Dauntless could stop crimes on the boardwalk without even leaving the Rig, with his extending Arclance.

My thoughts often turned to Dauntless. What would happen if we met? Why were we so similar?

Like me, he made items more powerful over time, gradually letting them acquire unique abilities. He hadn’t found a limit yet, and I hoped it would be the same for me. He was Brockton Bay’s rising star, and as long as he got time to grow then within a few years he’d be one of America’s most famous heroes. And, although I was terrified to say it aloud I suspected, possibly, that I was growing quicker than him.

It was a terrifying prospect, and I didn’t—or hadn’t at least—planned to show myself until I was more certain.

I threw my Umbrella into the air, watching as it turned and then drifted down towards my hand, like a leaf. Capes who got stronger over time were as rare as hen's teeth, excluding tinkers of course, and most had a clear limit but my wiki diving had found about as many worldwide as lived in Brockton Bay. As well as Dauntless and myself, there was Challenger, whose weapons got bigger the more she attacked with them. There had been Dungeon Master, too, a cape who had been around a couple of years earlier. A vigilante, he was a parahuman who had gotten slowly stronger over several months, though how was unclear. He had been killed when Lung arrived in Brockton. Lung, of course, got stronger over the course of every fight until he was unbeatable.

I spun the umbrella and threw it up, but the angle was wrong. Its arc would take it clean over the fencing of the Boardwalk and onto the beach. Except, it didn’t. It fell back towards my hand, and I caught it. That was strange. I tried it again, varying the angle, and always it fell back to my hand. This was definitely new.

There had to be something in Brockton that made people that way, that made powers like these thrive here. Something about the city, and the way it seemed to be trying to bring the Wild West to the North East.

No one knew where powers came from, though there were many theories there was very little evidence. I didn’t buy that they were magical, not in the sense that some did, like Myrddin or Epoch. I had bought some amethysts and candles in my experiments to understand my power and they had done very little that I could detect to change how my power operated, though perhaps an ‘experimental’ mindset was the wrong approach for that sort of thing anyway.

What was agreed, and what was most widely reported on reputable websites like the PRT roster pages, and Wikipedia, was that powers came from doing something exceptional. In his interviews Dauntless had said that he got his from saving someone, and Triumph had helped prevent a stranger dying on a hike by calling for help. Most heroes had similar stories. You did something with 110% effort, and if you were the right sort of person, a good sort of person, you maybe got powers. I wondered what it said about me that mine had been so different. So much less heroic.

My umbrella was flying horizontally now. I threw it towards the sea and just like throwing it directly above my head it flew, turned, and fell back towards my hand. This could be useful. I could feel it now, a little bit of the weight in my hand. I could pitch it like pitching my voice. I threw it ahead of me, and tried to get it to fall up, perpendicular to me. Instead it sped up, colliding with a metal bin with a great crack. Oops. From where it impaled the metal, I called it back to my hand and it rocketed back.

I had walked nearly the entire length of the Boardwalk and the sun was well and truly set now. It was dark enough that I expected I might be able to do some good if I headed into the shadier parts of the city. I was a little heavy hearted, I had harboured a small hope that one of them on the Rig would have come out to meet me.

The nearest exit was between an artisanal coffee place and a New Age jewellery shop, and then I was off wooden planks and onto normal sidewalk. Lords Street was the central avenue of Brockton Bay, passing through the Docks in the north to Downtown where it curved around the headland of the Bay and headed towards Massachusetts. Brockton Bay was an old city, and at least in the east it had that colonial style of street layout, where everything was all tangled together and each had its own name.

Lords Street was broad, a four lane street, and bus stops lined both sides, busy even at this time of evening. I waved to an old lady when I crossed the street and headed towards ABB territory.

I was only a block in the wrong direction when I heard the crash. It came from directly behind me, squealing tires and then the crunch of metal like a cannon. The air was suddenly full of cawing birds and I took off running back the way I had come. I ducked down an alley as a shortcut, and it was straight enough that I could use my sneakers. Every few seconds I darted ahead half a dozen yards like a shadow.

As I hopped an inconveniently placed crate there were three loud cracks, then half a dozen more, and it took a moment for my brain to catch up to my ears. Gunshots. And a number of men screaming and shouting, and it wasn’t English. The ABB? I wasn’t going to put my head out while they were shooting and figure it out. I played with the flap of my utility belt. I had almost nothing in there of use, one pair of moderately empowered handcuffs were no use in a gang fight, nor was some needle and thread, or half a can of pepper spray. A cellphone would have been very useful but I didn't have that either. But that was Lords Street that they were shooting on, the main way through the city, I thought of the old lady who had waved at me as I passed, surely someone would have called the police.

What could I do? I looked up towards the roof of the red-brick building hemming me in. If I’d had some rope I could have thrown my gravity-defying umbrella like a grappling hook and climbed up. Although…

I threw my umbrella so that it sailed up and its arc would stop it from falling to my hand. With a clatter, it landed on top of the short residential block. If I could call it to my hand from standstill, while it was blocked, would it pull me towards it instead? I lifted my hand and prepared to latch onto the wall if this worked. I felt the resonance, the pitch, and then my umbrella skidded towards the roof edge and leapt off to fall towards me. Irritating.

There was a scream from beyond the alley, and a longer burst of gunfire, then the screaming of metal on metal.

If only my shoes could dash up as well as along. I’d tested, but they only let me run more quickly, propelling me along the road. Jumping, trying to step into the air, or just dashing up, didn’t work. It was frustrating because the red-brick of the alley wall would’ve been perfect. There were no windows or ledges to get in the way, just a smooth wall all the way to the lip of the roof…

I took a run the narrow width of the alley and got one foot, then the second onto the wall with my momentum, and then I dashed. It got me to within fingertips of the roof ledge and I caught it and dangled there for a second before I pulled myself up. Take that gym rope.

There was gravel on the rooftop, and some air conditioning units and a little lip around the edges. Quietly, I snuck closer towards where the gunshots were coming from. It was dark but I kept low.

There were four SUVs, two normal cars and a van. The SUVs had pinned in the other three by parking across the road on both sides, and behind them men in balaclavas were shooting in short, loud bursts.

The cars were suffering. They’d stopped at awkward angles and there were people falling out of the cars, firing back from the window. Second by second, less and less.

I had to do something, I couldn’t just watch as people were murdered. Gangsters or not. This hadn’t been what I was expecting, or what I’d prepared for. My tongue felt too large for my mouth, and my fingers were sweaty.

I wouldn’t jump down. I could use the new trick of my Umbrella to harass the men behind the vans closest to me. I was just a little back from where the ambush was taking place, and from my height I could get them easily.

I threw the umbrella at the nearest thug with an automatic weapon. There was an explosion. These two things were unrelated. I didn’t see if my umbrella hit but it looked like it wasn’t just my attention called away. There was another explosion, then another, then a fourth and I flinched back, falling onto the roof to keep myself clear.

When I looked back I saw him. Oni Lee. He wore a demon mask, and his costume was green and loose. I’d seen pictures of him before and he reminded me of a samurai, with those sandals that they wore, and the slightly hanging way the clothes flared out from his belts and his bandoliers. He was decked with knives, and grenades, although I couldn’t see them. They didn’t glint in the streetlights the way his knives did.

Oni Lee was a teleporting mass murderer, he was extremely difficult to pin down and extremely dangerous. He seemed to be on the side of the vehicles trapped in the middle, and those men that were able to pick themselves up hurried backwards from the vans, running.

That was it then. Oni Lee had arrived and what had been a slaughter for whoever was attacking the ABB was completely flipped. At least it meant I didn’t need to get any more involved.

There were no people still in the bus stops, and a lot of the windows in the buildings facing the Boardwalk were now dark. I looked at the Rig. There must be hundreds of people who could see this fight, someone had to have called the police by now. Maybe even the Protectorate, considering where we were. The forcefield continued to shimmer, if they were coming then they weren’t ready yet. I wasn’t ready to tangle with Oni Lee, but maybe I could help out if the heroes made it in time. I wanted to make a reputation for myself, what better way was there?

It was my looking out across the sea that made me miss where they came from. Oni Lee was pulling a ABB ganger out of the front car’s window, and he had his back to them too.

The Empire.

“Nip!” shouted Hookwolf, the one in the middle, and the two villains on either side leapt to strike at Oni Lee as he straightened.

Hookwolf was one of the few Empire capes I knew more than a sentence’s worth about before I got my powers. He was Oni Lee’s racist counterpart, the ‘violent’ cape in the Empire. He wrecked shops, murdered, and extorted. His face was on national news far more than the rest of the gang capes in Brockton, but he was strong, and he had yet to be taken in and kept in.

Hookwolf was blonde, with lanky, greasy hair that I could see from here, and a metal mask in the shape of his namesake. In the moment after his shout he was gone, replaced by a screeching, tearing whirl of blades in the shape of a wolf.

He and his buddies were too slow though. When Oni Lee was struck he exploded into a cloud of ash. Suddenly it was all chaos again. It was three on one, but I could hardly see who was attacking what. There were constant explosions. Noise so loud I could feel it, and it melded with the gunfire that started up again from inside the cars.

I didn’t know what to do. Stormtiger and Cricket, the other two villains were fast. They moved as quickly as I could track them, and as Oni Lee teleported around the limited space between the SUVs they were on him constantly. Like doubles in a tennis game, one of them was always moving to be in a position to pounce on wherever Oni Lee could move next.

I tried desperately to remember what I could of their powers. Stormtiger, controls the wind, makes claws, good senses. Cricket I was less sure about. Enhanced senses. Fast. That was it, without my notebooks. She had little miniature scythes in each hand I could see. Kama. She moved them like a machine.

Hookwolf couldn’t keep up. He was fast. As fast as them, to be sure, but he couldn’t respond as quickly and Oni Lee could teleport in an instant. His power wasn’t flashy, and he left a perfect copy of himself behind, whenever he teleported. They lasted for a few seconds, but it was enough time to pull a pin, or a knife. I could see they had no self-preservation instinct. Every time a grenade went off there would be a cry, or the shatter of glass, and the sound of metal hitting metal.

Even from where I was hiding, I could see that the ground was littered with shrapnel and the cars were perforated like tear-away paper, big nasty gouges through every panel.

It lasted less than a minute, but it felt like hours. Oni Lee fled, and Stormtiger and Cricket chased after him. I saw him teleporting down the road, drawing the two villains away.

Hookwolf was on top of one of the Empire’s roadblocks, and four legs became two as the metal poured into the shape of a man, shrinking in on itself. When he leapt down onto the ground the asphalt cracked and the SUV rocked on its wheels.

He was coming my way. He bypassed the van and its now open back doors – when had that happened – and I lost sight of him as he got right below. Had he found me? Did he know I was up here? Hookwolf’s wiki page, and his news appearances, never said anything about enhanced senses. A terrible feeling came over me, a deep cold that suddenly struck me through. Hookwolf. He could smell me.

I stood. There was no use hiding. My umbrella! I had never called it back from that first throw. Had he spotted it? I peaked over the edge but in the dark I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see him either, or hear him. If he had it and I called it, what would happen? If he didn’t and I called it, would it give me away? I had to see what he was doing. I tip-toed away from Lords Streets back towards the alley and the wall I’d climbed up.

Down below Hookwolf was standing over a man in a bandana, in the green of the ABB. Hookwolf’s arm stretched into a long serrated blade. Before I could move a muscle Hookwolf stabbed him so hard I could hear it strike the concrete on the other side. I gasped despite myself and held a hand to my mouth.

I called my umbrella to my hand, and watched Hookwolf turn the man to one side. He had something on his back, a duffle bag, and Hookwolf pulled it off roughly and left the dead man face down in the alley. There was a loud crack as the Umbrella struck the roof on its path to me and then tumbled over the edge to reach my hand.

Hookwolf heard it. He tossed the bag in his hand to the side and in a moment was all metal again. He was racing out, back towards the cars before I could even shout. A moment later I heard that now distinctively familiar sound of metal on metal.

The choice to me was obvious. Hookwolf and the Empire wanted whatever was in that bag, enough to go to war in the middle of the City. I opened my Umbrella and jumped down. This was the only trick I had known about before tonight. Like a parachute it let me drop safely to the floor, and my shoes made sure my landing was silent.

Behind me, the shrieking of the cars got quieter then stopped. I tried not to look at the man on the floor. Tried not to see the huge jagged wound in his stomach, or all the blood on the floor. So much blood. I picked up the bag Hookwolf had thrown to the side and used the handles like backpack straps.

I squeezed past the crate and then I ran. I used my sneakers as much as I could as often as I could, and I ran. I ran all the way home.

***** *****

I got back in no time at all, covered in a cold sweat. The bag was heavy, my limbs were heavier, and I’d let go of the Umbrella at some point so that I could pump my arms harder, calling it to me after every few steps.

There was no truck outside the house, so I didn’t have to worry about being noticed by my dad and I couldn’t do anything about whoever chose to look outside their windows. Still, to be extra careful, I ran half the street beyond my house. I ducked into someone else’s back garden and clumsily clambered over maybe ten fences to get to my own backyard.

The back door was slammed open with a wince as it hit the kitchen wall hard, and I hurried down to the basement and pushed the boxes to one side. I opened up the space underneath and stuffed my umbrella, my costume and the duffle bag in. It almost didn’t fit, but some generous kicking stuffed it down.

I showered. There was no blood on me, from the bag or from the man. I settled a bit after that. Felt a little calmer, and let the warm water soothe my nerves. My dad came back while I was in, and I could hear him rummage around and make his way to his bedroom.

When I finished, I towelled my hair dry, sat in the window, and pulled out one of my journals. I was still strung up, and maybe writing it down in vague terms would help me. It didn’t help me deal with school, but I was willing to give it another shot here. The window was open and I looked at the street as I considered how to start.

There was a black SUV crawling down the street. It had tinted windows, and it was moving at a snail’s pace. I watched it creep up to my house and then continue, slowly passing by.

I couldn’t take my eyes away from the road. Stupid. Stupid, I thought. To have run straight home, without seeing if anyone was following me. I should’ve at least hidden the bag, or taken it to the police, or done anything other than I had done.

I closed the curtains so there was only a slight crack, and stayed there for hours, until well after midnight. It passed down my street three more times.

***** *****


	3. 1.2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The day after the morning before.

**1.2**

***** *****

I slept awfully and woke up angry. The street outside the window looked normal. There were no ominous patrolling cars, no police cordons, no lifeless gangers slowly dying on the sidewalk. It was sunny and blue. I felt terrible.

It wasn’t far from eight in the morning. My legs ached. My feet hurt. My fingers felt like they were cramping. 

That was one reason for my aggravation. The other was that normally I’d sleep with my ring on, and my handcuffs around one ankle, and I had been planning to use my costume as PJs now it was complete. 

An entire night of charge, wasted. I could scream. I brushed my hair furiously, snarling as it tugged on every knot. My powers already took too long to be useful and if I kept forgetting to maximise my time with my items then it would be years before I was relevant; years before I’d feel confident taking on the sort of parahumans I’d seen fighting last night. 

The ABB gang member bleeding to death in the alley sprung into my mind again, so sharp that I could smell how the blood mixed with concrete. In my head I could hear a scream I wasn’t sure he’d actually made, and in the mirror I saw his spasming as Hookwolf turned him over. 

I wiped my eyes. The _other_ other reason I was irritated was that despite my Dad’s night out he was up before me. 

I could hear him making breakfast in the kitchen. It was a bit unfair of me, but it would have been better if he was at work, or in bed. I needed to get my stuff out the basement and I needed to see what was in the duffle bag to make sure it wasn’t dangerous. It was heavy, and I didn’t want to find out it was a bag of guns, or a bomb, too late. 

The stairs creaked on the third and first, and in the kitchen my Dad turned to look at me as he whisked some eggs. 

“Morning owl, you look rough. Did you sleep OK?” 

I screwed up my face at him, and he had the gall to laugh at me. I drew my bathrobe around me and sat at the table. 

“Tea, please,” I asked. 

He put a kettle on the stove and we lapsed into silence. In times gone by, Mom would’ve bridged the gap. Dad said part A, I said part B, and Mom took us back to the start with part C. Though, in the interest of fairness, there used to be a lot more to my part B before she passed. Before Emma. 

Dad set a cup of Taylors of Harrogate on the table, my favourite, mostly because it was my name, and gave me a weak smile. I gave it a stir and blew gently, he always put honey in though I said I didn’t need it anymore. 

“Dad,” I said, “what are your plans for the day?”

“I’m going to head to the Union for an hour this morning, for the silence," he said. "Don't worry — I’ll be back for the parade.”

An hour would let me inspect the bag, but I still wanted to go to the library and find out what message boards were saying about last night. Had anyone seen me? 

“I was thinking I might go to the Boardwalk this afternoon. We don’t have to go to the parade just because.”

“Oh,” he said, “don’t you want to go? I said to Alan that we could meet them there.” That was a bucket of ice water down my back. 

“I told you Emma and I aren’t as close at school any more, Dad.” 

He smiled at me brightly. “I know that’s getting you down but you’re still friends, right? Maybe this’ll be a chance to kick whatever’s going on back into gear.” 

I didn’t answer for a minute. “Yeah, maybe,” I said, quietly. “I’m going to go shower.” I trudged up the stairs and didn’t look back at his face. 

Focus on the bag, Taylor, I told myself. This is all just humble beginnings. You’re going to be a big hero.

***** *****

Millions of dollars, drugs, and a tiny bag of loose gemstones.

I turned my umbrella over the tops of my hands, practicing my dexterity. It helped me think. 

The bag was full of notes bound together with rubber bands... All of them hundreds, and practically the whole bag. This was … a lot. 

I didn’t have time to count it, or to figure out what to do with the drugs so I zipped up the bag and pushed it back into the underground space. I put the concrete back, and then pushed the boxes back into position and made sure the dust didn’t look too disturbed. As well as I could anyway. 

There was blood on my costume. Over the frilly cuffs of my white blouse shirt and on the back of the purple vest where I’d carried the bag. Why had I chosen white? Why had I not checked to see if his blood was on the bag before picking it up? I was carrying around evidence of a murder all over me. 

I scrubbed my costume in the sink and tried to think about the money. Maybe the library would have something on police procedures, there must be a proper way to handle evidence. I would have to count it at least and … weigh it? I’d weigh the drugs, and the diamonds, at least. That had to be useful. It would put me in a better position for when I registered as a superhero properly, make me look professional.

Catching Hookwolf would have looked better though, no matter how much money was in that bag. Or Oni Lee or whoever. It would’ve been something that put me on the map. 

It was important, getting recognised. New Wave’s continuing activity proved that. An independent superhero team, they’d made national news when I was still a kid by unmasking publicly. Their big splash was still carrying them now, years longer than any other independent group in the North-East. Eclipse had to do the same, something that would make a mark that lasted. 

“Eclipse,” I said, rolling it around on my tongue. It didn’t feel right still. Another for the maybe pile. 

There was nowhere for my costume to dry. I hung it up in the closet. It was so patchwork I had no idea what would happen if I tried to machine dry it. The current stopped as it was placed onto the hanger and I sighed. I wished it was faster, I wished it didn’t need contact. If I could’ve charged my costume at home while I was stuck in school… 

I heard the truck pull onto the drive and my dad’s boots stomping up the steps onto the porch. 

“Taylor!” he called. 

“Coming!” 

Except I wasn’t really. I made sure my enhanced shoes were on. If Emma was there then I wouldn’t be. Was it too much to ask that a day away from school be a day without her? I turned my ring to crystal shadow-stuff while I went downstairs, letting it evaporate when Dad started to turn my way. Whatever else it might be able to do, the presence of it made me feel more settled, more calm. 

The usual feeling settled in my stomach like a hot coal but my Dad looked at me and I smiled. “Let’s go,” I said.

Why did I feel worse heading to a parade than I did going out to look for criminals?

***** *****

New Wave.

How much money must they make? This was the sort of practical stuff that no amount of wiki diving covered. I knew there was a fee payable to the government, I knew that I’d be encouraged to take modules, and that there’d be no safety net, no one to cover my ass if I messed up. But how to do it? How to fund myself, and sign up, and not compromise my identity? I didn’t know. 

The only things that I _had_ seen at the library had been for over-eighteens. 

New Wave had made a worldwide impact when I was a kid and they were a group of independent heroes. They’d gotten bigger as their kids got powers and joined them in the field, but they’d also gotten less active. They weren’t full-time heroes any more, they had school, and jobs, but they proved it could be done here in Brockton Bay. The Parahuman’s Detroit. 

I looked at them as they flew, and the urge to shout up was overpowering. The closest I’d been to other heroes in my life, and I couldn’t talk to them, parahuman to parahuman. 

“What a sight, ey, Taylor?” My dad shaded his sight from the weak winter sun as Lady Photon and Laser Dream and Shielder soared towards us.

“It’s amazing,” I said. Shielder flew right over me, bringing up the edge of their formation. He couldn’t have been more than a dozen feet above me, and then they were past. A cheer trailed them like a Mexican wave. 

Before I got my powers, as a young girl, there had been a brief phase where my mom had bought me Protectorate Merchandise and I’d dressed as Alexandria. For most of my life I hadn’t been overly invested in the parahuman events that made Brockton famous. I couldn’t see why now. They looked like angels, and they could fly. It was miraculous. I hoped I could do it one day. I doubted I’d look so natural. 

My dad had a hand on my shoulder and he steered us further in the direction of South beach. We were a block over from Lords Market, on one of the streets that I hadn’t patrolled along, yesterday. Squat buildings pinned us in and there was a crowd on both sides of the street, though it wasn’t quite shoulder to shoulder. 

The parade began at Sinclair Park and wound its way across Commercial Downtown until it reached Lords Street and turned onto Memorial Plaza. Before, Mom had needed to be with the other BU post-docs and professors and I’d see the parade arrive from the steps of the cenotaph. Today we were heading to the covered market because the Barnes liked to shop after the heroes passed by. 

There were four Barneses, but it was Alan who we saw first. Dad clapped him on the shoulder. 

“Hey Danny, hey Taylor. Nice to see you, it’s been too long.” Alan was a tall man, heavy set with sandy hair, and a bit of a belly, now that he was in his late forties. He was a lawyer and although he’d never been anything but decent to me he was too loud, too forceful, for me to have ever grown out of feeling awkward when I drew his attention. 

“Hey, Mr. Barnes,” I mumbled. 

He made conversation with my Dad, and I stood to one side, pretending to look out for the coming of the parade. The streets were lined on both sides, one person deep. Some enterprising folk had brought out camping chairs, and there were flags, and colours. Opposite me a little girl with black hair was dancing on and off the street. 

“Where are your girls?” asked my Dad. I studiously kept my gaze turned towards the coast.

“Anne’s with her college friends, Zoe and Emma are getting drinks.” Alan was outnumbered. His wife, Zoe, had formerly been one of my mum’s closest friends – they’d met at NYU, both of them active in a feminist movement that had made national news back then – and then they’d both met guys and settled down into regular jobs. 

Maybe that would be my story one day, kids and a family and some tall tales about when I’d used my powers to fight crime for a while. Even as I thought it, I knew it was wrong. I could feel the shadowstuff turning, could feel my shoes, my ring, and my umbrella charging. Putting that behind me, not using my powers in favour of an office job? Unlikely. There was a reason _active_ heroes formed the tail end of the Veterans Day parade. 

“Dad,” I asked, “can I go and get a drink, too?” 

It wouldn’t be long until the Parade started, and there were no obvious street vendors anywhere along the street. In the market I could get ‘lost’ pretty easily, no doubt. It’d give me time to go to Lords Street and see what had come of the crime scene. 

“Wait a few minutes, I’ll go with you.” I sighed. He was overprotective, even at a well policed event like this. 

I ran the sole of my sneaker over the kerb, my toes were half out into the empty street. Across from me an old man was sitting in a chair waving the flag. 

“Can I go get a flag?” I asked. 

Alan broke off his conversation and dug around in a bag by his feet. He pulled out little laminated Stars and Stripes on sticks. 

“Here you go, kiddo,” he said. I took the flag slowly. He ruffled my hair. “Ah, it’s good to see you both again. It’s been too long.” 

I glowered at him but he didn’t notice. His eyes were fixed on something over my head and I knew exactly what. 

“Here they come,” said Alan. 

So much for a quick getaway.

***** *****

“Oh em gee, he’s _so_ hot. Taylor, isn’t he gorgeous?” asked Emma

My dad laughed uncomfortably, and I shrugged. Whatever I had expected this wasn’t it. Not a day earlier, I had finally closed the door on Emma, closed the door on a year of trying to understand her, of feeling like there was a mask she was wearing and that we could ever be what we were. 

“I can see it’s not Miss Militia you’re looking at,” and then she laughed. And it was the same laugh I’d heard when we were kids. And it was the same laugh that I’d heard when she’d seen me trip, or I’d had my bag stolen, or I’d… 

I was trapped, in my own body, tense and rigid under my hoodie. The pitch of my ring and my sneakers was just a hair away from matching the power in my middle and turning into crystal dark-stuff. The heroes were marching away. Emma laughed. 

I tugged at my dad’s arm. “Thirsty,” I said. Like I was a fucking child. 

“Yeah, sure,” he said. He smiled at me when he turned away from Zoe, a watery smile. “Just the PRT and the emergency services left.” 

Some sort of noise stuck in my throat. 

“I’ll go with her, Danny,” said Emma. “I could go for a coffee.” 

Her mom sighed. “You just had one, Emma.” 

Alan looked at Zoe sharply. “Zoe.” He reached for his pocket. “Do you need any money?”

Anne snorted and turned her head away. I looked between them. My dad was unaware, his eyes still following the departing heroes on their motorcycles. 

“We’re fine, right, Tay-Tay?”

“I can wait.” My voice was aimed at the pavement.

“Nonsense.” Emma took me by the arm and it was all I could do not to push her off. “Oh,” said Emma, and she put a finger to her chin. “I know the Wards are doing a meet and greet, after the parade. Come on let’s go.” She pulled me forward. 

“I’ll be right here,” said Dad. 

When we turned the end of the street, I put my other hand under her crooked arm and pushed her off. 

“Ok, that’s enough.” 

The ambulances were passing us, turning around the corner with their lights flashing and strobing us in blue. 

Emma looked at me, cocking her head. “Come on, they won’t be there for very long.” 

I frowned. The Wards had led near the front of the parades, only a short way behind the few remaining Brocktonites who had fought in World War 2. Compared to the Protectorate – who fielded only Triumph, Miss Militia, and their leader Armsmaster – all the Wards had marched in the parade, with it being a school holiday. The Wards were all kids with costumes that looked way more impressive than their powers or puppy-fat faces deserved. I got the feeling that they did a lot more public relations than public service. It made sense that they’d be sticking around to give out autographs, they were that sort of superhero. 

“Why are you being like this?” 

Emma rolled her eyes. “Isn’t this what you wanted? Make your mind up Taylor.” She grabbed my arm again but I shook her off. The sidewalk had caught me like quicksand, my feet didn’t seem able to walk away. Emma tutted. “I guess yesterday was a one-off”. She laughed, then crouched over, looking up and under my hood. She slapped her hands on her knees quickly. “Come on, Taylor! Come on. Don’t you want to meet the nice Wards? Yeah? Who’s a good girl?” 

The anger that had been so useful yesterday wasn’t there. I just stood there and took it. Emma stopped, she stood straight and I met her eyes. She looked offended. Was she regretting the lack of an audience, or the wasting of good material? The moment dragged on before she shook her head and sighed. 

“Whatever, Taylor. You’d probably put them off their job. Just go away.” She turned, and my body unlocked. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she promised.

I stood there until she was hidden by the crowd before I stomped my heel into the sidewalk. Hand in pocket, I turned back towards my Dad, but I couldn’t come back without Emma, not if they’d expected us to go harass the Wards. Though it wouldn’t be harassment for Emma. I could see her, batting her eyelashes, standing with a hand on her hip while she charmed Aegis, or got Vista to ask her for tips about hair care or whatever it was she found interesting when I wasn’t around to squash. 

I skipped the turning to Lords Market and carried on up the street in the direction of yesterday’s fight. Hand in pocket, I let the pitch of my ring resonate with my core. The current flipped, changed, stopping the charging of my ring but leaving me with a different feeling. Something more subtle. The rough feel of the crystal pressed against my thumb as I ran it over the ring. 

If I wanted, I could join the Wards. I could’ve done it months ago, could have been one of the capes Emma had gone to meet. She’d have looked at me with wide eyes and a genuine smile. At least until I spoke. But I hadn’t. Stupid as it was. I’d looked up the deal with the Wards a couple of time at the start – a big trust fund, and a pocket money salary. Professional training, and better schooling; help with tactics and costumes, and all kinds of other little things – but my stomach would knot every time I really thought about it. I’d have to tell my dad, and I was sure he’d not want me to do anything at all. He’d want me to ignore my powers. 

_And worse than that, they won’t like me_. I could see it. A bunch of rich, powered, superhero teens, all at the same school with some depressing, uninteresting new girl from Winslow tagging behind them to fashion walks and tv shows like a canker sore, with a power that wouldn’t be helpful for months. Particularly if I’d joined when my powers had first come. I didn’t want the teen drama. Desperately. 

Yellow police tape, it cut off across the whole of the street, with some barriers in front of it. A police man held up a hand as I got closer. He had a handlebar moustache, tattoos on his arm, and a mean turn to his face. Not someone for parade duty. 

“Road’s closed,” he said. 

I leaned to look around him, the street looked different in the daylight. There were no vans so I couldn’t see exactly where it had all gone down, but some of the windows were smashed and the blacktop was chipped and cracked in a way that I could see here. Even still, it was a little underwhelming. I had heard dozens of grenades, and seen a lot of men falling out of cars shot. I’d expected more… Something more fitting for a war zone. Craters. Triage Tents. 

“What happened?” I asked the cop. 

“What do you think happened? This ain’t Palm Beach. Move along.” 

What a jerk. He wasn’t even looking at me. It stung. It was _me_ , I’d been there. I’d… well, not helped. But I’d been there. I’d have helped in some way if I could have. And _there_ it was, the anger, like coals in my chest. 

“This is our city, too,” I told him, “we all live here.” 

“Oh yeah?” he asked. I thought he’d follow it up, follow it with some question that propelled me along my journey, some key moment I could look back on. Like, ‘what have you done for it lately’, or ‘you and who else’? But he didn’t, not aloud. He just waved a hand at me and looked away, and crossed his arms. 

Where his sleeve rode up I saw the two lightning bolts together. Sowilo, he’d say. Or maybe that he was a big Shakin’ Stevens fan. But the Empire had been around for longer than I’d been alive, and I knew what it meant. I looked at him in his blues, with his shiny shoes, and his shiny badge. 

My feet carried me back to my Dad, but my mind was miles away. I couldn’t stop thinking about the cop, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Emma, or Winslow. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Bay, and the gangs, and how all of them together were ruining it, and I couldn’t stop thinking that I had done _nothing_ last night. Nothing to help, nothing to act. I had just _watched_.

I turned back towards Lords Market, and it felt appropriate. Like I was turning my back on the cop, and on the Wards further down that same street. 

I’d figured out what it was that was gnawing at me. Why the money hadn’t felt like a win. I didn’t want to be a cop, I didn’t want to be a play-hero. Turning in a bag of money wasn’t going to make me a superhero. 

I had to go bigger. I had to do something meaningful. 

I was going to make that money work for me. And I didn’t mean buying shit.

***** *****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Any and all concrit appreciated, as always. Do let me know if you spot any silly mistakes like planning notes or equally silly. I've read this one aloud, so hopefully not.


	4. 1.3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N, thanks for the kudos, subscriptions and hits so far. I really didn't expect anyone to really care or look at this, and hoped I'd just familiarise myself with AO3, for when I return to the HP scene next, so the silent approval is really meaningful, and thank you.

**1.3**

***** *****

School was school. Whatever yesterday had promised or threatened didn’t come to anything; like my power, Emma and her minions took time to do anything ‘good’. When the bell rang, I stuffed what few things I kept in my locker into my bag, shouldered my backpack and made my way down the half-lit corridors, through the metal door, escaping into the freedom of the weekend. The heady smell of rain on dry asphalt was there, and my footsteps were light in my sneakers. All the way downtown.

I took Rills Lane away from Winslow until I was onto Beacon Street heading into SoLo, South Lords. South Lords was full of the sorts of places where BU students would drink coffee and try to get people to ask them about what they were reading. And also nightclubs. The Palanquin was there, the biggest and most famous club in the Bay, and the place to go to hire independent capes, or so the PHO boards said. SoLo was the sort of place teenagers went to generally stand around with their friends, so I didn’t visit it often. 

I was heading the other way, towards Lords Market near the coast, on the edge of the district. Brockton’s Central Library was a squat building, from a different time when all people had to worry about were the Russians, and the architecture was brutal concrete layered like a tower of waffles. As we didn’t have a computer at home I came here on days where I couldn’t use a computer at school. 

There had been a car, tailing me, I was sure, and then two days of silence. When the Chain Man’s Gang were kicked out of Brockton it had made global headlines, by the end. Down one large bag full of dollars, some jewels, and some drugs, a pause for quiet reflection from the ABB didn’t seem right. Lung and Oni Lee were much more aggressive than the Chain Man had been, and the other shoe had yet to drop. Fireworks. TV ‘Breaking News’. Stilted attempts at conversation about where not to go on my own from my Dad; I wasn’t seeing evidence of an escalation that was affecting the city at large. 

The library wasn’t busy but I went to the second floor to be careful. There were computer banks on each storey, organised into grids close to the window, with bookshelves hiding us from the stairs and the main study desks. The chairs were made of scratchy blue polyesters and I took a computer in the corner that faced towards the window, listening to the clacks as it whirred to life. 

My notepad came out my bag while I waited, quickly turned to the pages I’d been scribbling during Math. It wasn’t enough to be the Fastest Umbrella Slinger in the East. Thursday had shown me that, and my powers weren’t going to bridge the gap quickly enough. I had to take things into my own hands, I had to be ready when the overdue response came … well, due. 

Brainstorming how to get more out of my slow-burn power was tricky though. I’d come up with tying my umbrella to a rope and using it as a grappling hook, and soaking the outer canopy in pepper spray till it hurt to look at. 

I sighed. 

This wasn’t the first time I’d had the idea. If I could just watch how other capes fought, how they leveraged their powers, maybe I could learn from them, but parahuman fights were hard to film. Understandably, educating potential heroes wasn’t high up any given villain’s priority list, and the PRT were hardly better. 

Searching “Protectorate Heroes fight Crime” on YouTube got more anti-drug propaganda than anything else. 

I didn’t want to be one of those people who relied on the PHO for their news, not when my time was so limited and could be better spent charging my costume and umbrella. Still, I looked over the Brockton board for news. 

There were two threads, one on the attack with scattered footage of the incident, and another on the Protectorate clean up. It was an indictment of the city that three pages was all the former got. Another day, another gang fight. There was a vague consensus that it was the Empire and the ABB, and that Lung would not be pleased. 

“Duh,” I mumbled, under my breath. 

The Brockton Herald was more helpful.

ELEVEN KILLED IN GANG FIGHT.

Eleven. And apparently 7 more in Brockton General. If anything I was surprised it was so few, there had been more than twenty there. I took a breath. The article outlined the bare bones before giving itself over to what the people wanted: how many villains were involved. Oni Lee it got correct, but it missed out Cricket, saying it had been one on two, with extensive property damage and threat to life.

There was a statement from the PRT, ‘Dauntless and Assault supported the police in the arrest of the warring gang members, but failed to apprehend the supervillains responsible for the wider destruction of property, who remain at large’, and then some more stuff about the Empire and recent gang actions in Brockton Bay. It was a concerning pattern, the newspaper suggested, and street violence was on the rise. Still, that’s what sold papers and in 2010, local papers needed to hustle. 

What was clear was that the ABB hadn’t done anything yesterday that I hadn’t heard about. The supervillains that led the gang were obviously waiting for something, but what could they need? I saw Oni Lee’s demonic mask, burning blood-red beneath bleak streetlights, turned towards two dark blue Empire vans. Hookwolf, serrated arm-knife piercing their courier. The ABB knew who had fought them just as much as I did. Perhaps it was something else that they were trying to find. Someone else. 

The two-tone chime of the library PA system came, then a young voice twisted into an inhuman cadence by decaying speakers. 

“Would all library users kindly make their way to the fire exit on the ground floor, immediately. There are reports of supervillain activity in the local area. Please remain calm.” 

There weren’t screams or anything dramatic like that. There were no tremors coming through our feet or shouts from the other side of the window. It couldn’t be that bad. Most people slung their backpacks or their laptop carriers over an arm and started heading to the staircase. I just needed a few more minutes. 

I had a plan, a plan to make sure that any retribution for lost money was turned in the right direction, but it wasn’t safe, especially without knowing exactly what I was dealing with. I wiki-walked my way over to Lung, who was the leader of the ABB as far as anyone knew, more than Oni Lee. A grainy image of him dominated the right-hand corner of the page. He was shirtless, tattooed, and he wore a silver mask. 

There was a surprising amount under his history heading but I wanted to know what he could _do_. 

“Miss. Miss, you need to make your way downstairs immediately.” 

I was the only one left up here, I realised, and a middle-aged woman with thick-rimmed glasses was scurrying my way. Her hair was pulled into a tight bun and the tension of it stretched her face into the shape of a vulture. 

“Up, up.” 

I gave her a nod, quickly, “just closing up,” I said. She wasn’t placated and put her hand under my arm to pull me off my chair. I managed to close the browsers, but not to log off. 

“I’m going.” I really was the last one. There was a guy from the third floor ahead of me on the stairs down, and another librarian joined the harridan to form an unimpressive riot line and push us out. We funnelled outside, back into what grey light got through the dreary post-rain cloud cover. 

“Please head towards the coast, the Protectorate are on their way,” said my vulture, and people fell into step. 

I hadn’t got what I wanted, about Lung or about the gang situation and I wasn’t going to. Better just to head home. There was always tomorrow. I shouldered my bag. 

The bus stops weren’t far away, and I had my pass still so I turned north to head home. Vulture grabbed my arm. 

“You need to come this way. Purity has been making passes over there,” she swept a hand out in a wide arc that covered most of the city, “it’s not safe for a young lady.” 

Purity. 

Purity, the E88 laser slinger who could take down most parahumans in a single blast, and fly across the width of the city in minutes. 

I had to chase her. Follow her. This had to be the response I’d been looking for, or the first spark, at least. SoLo wasn’t far from Empire gangland or from the Docks where the ABB ruled. She had to be swooping over these borderlands for a reason. 

I shook off the librarian’s arm, but her goodwill seemed exhausted because she hurried off in the direction of the other Brocktonites rather than try and browbeat me again. Was I missing something? Were libraries a common villain target, was this some blind spot I’d missed in my research? Did gang targets go: banks, pharmacies, art galleries … libraries? 

On the other side of brutalist concrete, back on the plaza that joined the street and the avenue back to SoLo proper, I caught a brief glimpse of her. Incandescent beneath an overcast sky, a shooting star dipping down towards the earth, I hated that I marvelled at her. 

No costume, no handcuffs, no umbrella and no plan, with a power that essentially did nothing of use, I sprinted towards the high-rise that had hidden her from view. The streets were pretty clear, which made sense, except for students who were trying to film her on their cellphones. Definitely non-natives, these were BU freshmen who didn’t know that Purity was too bright to get on film and too dangerous to be near. 

Purity was one of the strongest villains in the city, even Dauntless wouldn’t approach her by himself. And I was chasing her down without a plan. I slowed. 

This was stupid, this was moronic, and what would my dad say; what would he do if something happened to me? I was frightened that I knew the answer. I should just go ba–

There was a flash, that lit up everywhere at once like a lightning bolt without giving away where it came from. A quarter-second later came the boom. Like a bomb. Louder than the grenades of two days ago but further away, I felt it through my feet. I had to get higher.

SoLo was too commercial, and there weren’t many convenient alleys for me to duck down. There was one metal fire escape though and the bannister rattled and clanged as I pulled myself up it. From the roof, Purity was visible again. She was drifting downwards not far ahead of me. 

I couldn’t make out her limbs, or her features particularly, but there was a change in the non-shadow of her brightest parts and then a helix laser bolt spiralled down into the alley. This one evidently softer, I saw the beam but heard and felt nothing. Playing with her food, probably. 

The benefit of rare alleys was that ten or twelve buildings connected in a row, all the same height. I raised the ‘volume’ in my center, felt the pitch get closer then _chime_ in some soundless way as my power turned my things into their other state. In my umbral boots I dashed to the dividing wall of the rooftop and vaulted onto the next. 

The first gap I came too was eight feet wide. Not wide in any real sense, but wide to jump. I put my foot to the roof at full sprint, the wind pulled my hair backwards in caution – and leapt. And I pushed on my shoes to dash, but nothing happened. It didn’t work in the air. 

I crashed onto the edge of the roof ribs first and all the breath was driven out of me. My hands didn’t have anything to hold on to, my palms were pressed against flat, featureless concrete and I was falling I realised. I felt gravity turning on me, deciding I had to go down not forward. The gap between my chest and the wall began to grow, and now my head was further out into the alley then my feet and my hands were free, and out began to be down. 

A hand closed around my arm. I was lifted up, slowly, until my toes could scrabble for the rooftop and I was let go with a grunt from my saviour. I couldn’t see her, couldn’t look directly at her, but I could see my two shadows. 

“You ok?”

I should’ve done something. Something heroic, like take a swing at the woman who had just saved my life or prevented broken bones, at least. 

The star at the centre of her corona orbited me, skimming the rooftop. “You could have done yourself some damage,” she said, and through my fingers, I saw her burning limb wave in me. “You need to get yourself a mask, your hood has come down.” 

“Uh, thanks,” I said. I pulled at the drawstrings of my hoody again, closing it to a small circle that I could just about see out of. “I have a costume, I just didn’t have– I saw the light–” Did I sound sulky? If there was a correct tone to strike with a villain who saved your life while you charged to attack them, I didn’t know it. 

“You’re very new to this, aren’t you?” She was laughing at me. She began to float away slightly quicker than a fast walk, back in the direction I’d first seen her. “Come on,” she said, “the Protectorate will be here soon.” 

Did she want to be arrested? This wasn’t what I’d expected, but I ran after her. If she was turning herself in then this was the opportunity I’d waited for. The sort of introduction I needed. 

“This will be a good introduction, for you,” her voice came again. I was certain Purity was a racist, an eye pain, and more dangerous than nearly any other villain in the city, but a telepath? No. 

Her voice was ordinary, and that struck me. I don’t know what I’d expected. She didn’t have that Brockton musicality in her voice, or the hard ts that separated us from nearby Boston or Portland, but she didn’t sound like she’d fit in on a Saturday morning cartoon. If I heard her order a skinny latte on the Boardwalk I wouldn’t look twice. 

Ahead of me she dipped down into an alley. “There’s a fire escape. It’s safe down here.” 

From the lip of the last rooftop I could see her handiwork. The far opening of the alley at ground level had a smoking, shallow crater where the ruined corpse of a dumpster had a few tortured strips reaching up towards the sky. Closer to me three gang members were sitting against a wall, arms tied together and bandanas pulled off their faces. 

Purity held herself above them. I couldn’t tell if she was facing towards me or towards her rivals. 

“Come on,” she called. Me then. “They’re all secure, you can come down.” 

Morbid curiosity pulled me forward. I should’ve run, but even with my boots I couldn’t escape her and she’d already seen my face. I’d wanted to find out what was going on with the gangs, here was my chance. 

I clambered down the iron fire escape. My sneakers were still transformed so I was soundless where I stepped. The lack of noise made the climb down feel longer and more ominous than it should. The ABB thugs didn’t move as I got close. 

They were out of it. One of them had blood dripping from their temple, and the others looked like they had gone ten rounds with ten different heavy-weights. I approached gingerly but they didn’t look at me. They were unconscious, I realised. 

“It can look rough but when you’re an independent hero without support you can’t afford to have them make a move when your back is turned.” 

I had no idea why an Empire villain was advising me on how to be a hero. Whatever had led that SUV to prowl my neighbourhood hadn’t made it back to Purity, not if she was treating me like this. _She wouldn’t be treating you like this if she hadn’t seen your skin_ , a little voice said. 

“Why are you helping me?” I asked. Now that she had seen my face I had to know if she thought she had some leverage. If she thought the E88 could make a pet of me. 

She didn’t reply straight away, and the moment dragged out. Her arm pointed at my feet, and the light of her penetrated the dark crystal of my shadow shoes. I could see my socks. 

“You _are_ new, aren’t you? You’re not a Ward?” 

A part of me worried it was a trap, that the admission would have her blast me into a puff of smoke. But she _had_ saved me from the fall, and it was a weird move if she wanted me dead.

“I’m new,” I said. 

She rotated in the air, turning away from me to the ABB members. “Yeah,” she said, “I thought so.” 

“Is that a bad thing?” I asked. 

“It’s a hard thing.” 

“Why?” 

“Come and help me move these scum out the alley. I’ll check for weapons then you pull them.” 

They looked pretty banged up, and even without First Aid training, I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to be moving them. “Can’t that be dangerous,” I asked, “shouldn’t we leave them here until the PRT arrives?” 

Still, I jumped down from the final tier of the fire escape, and Purity’s radiance dimmed. I could see her figure faintly now, though it was all white-hot and luminescent, and her hair floated like she was in space. 

“It’s hard for me to walk, when I’m like this,” she said. Floating over them she patted them down, and I stood to one side, hoodie drawn up tight, my right hand squeezing the forearm of my left. She turned one over so they were face down, and their breathing became heavy like they were snoring. “You pull,” she said. 

“Uh–” I did as I was told. I grabbed him by his collar and hauled him like a sack of potatoes, pushing him onto his back again so that his breathing came easier. He was a big guy and it was less difficult than I’d imagined. But then, I’d carried the duffle bag a lot further, and it was almost as heavy. 

“The PRT won’t want to come into an alleyway to collect them. It makes everyone much less jumpy if we get them out onto the street.” 

He dragged, and he wore thick boots that caught on detritus in the alley, and the fragments that had spalled off the alley floor where Purity’s blasts had struck. 

“It’s not glamorous, is it?” She was floating in something not unlike a crouch over the third unconscious gang member. I looked at my thug. Blood from his nose was trickling over his lips and where he breathed the blood bubbled on his lips. I looked up and she was looking at me, floating upright again. 

“I was your age when I got my powers,” she said, “if I could go back, I’d join the Wards. I’ve been fighting gang members and stopping crimes for two years, and I’ve still not done enough that I can register properly, or do good without worrying they’re going to arrest me.” 

My mouth moved before my brain had really caught up. “You’re not with the Empire anymore?” 

She went bright again, in an instant, and I flinched. Bright enough that I couldn’t see her, but I still heard the sound she made. She didn’t speak again, and I pulled him to the edge of the alley. There weren’t any normal people around the alley exit, the sidewalk was empty for a good distance either way. Brocktonites knew danger, and they cleared out quickly. 

The second one was pulled back in silence similarly, but when I returned for the third she spoke to me again. 

“You should join the Wards,” she said, quietly. “That’s my advice. Don’t end up like me.” 

“The Wards … they aren’t a good fit for me,” I said, “I want to get more done, I don’t want to play the hero.” And it was honest. I wanted something more straight forward, something where I saw a problem and I solved it, there and then. I didn’t want to wait around, I didn’t want to sit on the sidelines until I was old enough to join the real government team. 

It gave me an idea. She was trying to wash away the sins of the Empire. I had been looking to find out what was happening. 

“There was something … a couple of days ago,” I said. “It’s all over the PHO boards, if you’ve heard of them–” 

She laughed out loud. “Yes.” The smallest crosswind drifted her closer in my direction. “I have heard of the Parahuman Online boards, believe it or not. I’m not seventy.” 

I grimaced. “Yes. There was a fight between Oni Lee and some other capes. People think it was a drug run or a money run, but either way it was a big gunfight right in the open, and a lot of people died. What does it mean? It’s been two days, why has nothing happened?” 

“I saw it on the news,” she said, “just on the news. I’m not with them. I don’t know what they get up to.” Her voice was firm. 

“But you know what they’d think right? You must have a guess as to why neither side has responded. This is a lot bigger than anything I can remember being reported in years. It feels important.” 

She shone for a moment longer, motionless in the air. Then the sound of sirens cut through. Building up, closing in, quickly. 

“It means,” she said, beginning to ascend, “it means it’s a bad time to be a new hero. Give it a few months. Join the Wards. It’s dangerous to learn the ropes right now and no one is going to cut you any slack.” She slowed for a moment, looking back at me, and her handiwork. Three broken, bloody gang members. “Better yet, find something else to do. See you around, hero.” And then she was higher than the rooftops, and she turned and shot away like a comet.

I was left at the edge of the alley, surrounded by three battered gang members, and then the PRT arrived.

***** *****


	5. 1.4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to BKing4, for helping point out where things should be tightened and clarified.

A/N: 

**1.4**

***** *****

Four hundred and fifty thousand, four hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and seventy thousand. The stack wobbled as I put the latest wad of bills on top. I took off the last two and put them on top of the dusty, cobweb covered box closest to me.

The money in the bag was bound into little bricks by mustard coloured strips of paper, helpfully embossed with $10,000 on each side. I’d put the jewels on my dad’s old multi-level toolbox, and the brown … drugs, of some kind, in a clear baggy. 

I hummed as I worked, just a little tune that I’d known forever and that Mom and I had often listened to on long trips to see Grandpa after he’d divorced Grandma but before he’d passed away. Before it had just been me, on my own. Two more little packets of money went onto the newest pile. Five hundred thousand. 

I took a nibbled HB pencil from behind my ear, and I jotted down the total underneath the four hundred thousand I had written a moment earlier. Hmmm. I was going to have to do it every two hundred thousand. I wasn’t close to being even a quarter of the way through the bag. 

Half a million bucks, more money than I’d ever seen in one place before, and _well_ over a million to go. Even knowing what it was, that it was evidence of a crime – crimes, plural – it was heady. 

With this sort of money… I saw a tiled kitchen floor, a new table in the hall, and the house painted the royal blue I remembered as a kid, rather than the flakey bruise-blue it was now. I would be sixteen in half a year. I imagined my dad driving a saloon and myself in something imported, something red, something the Barneses couldn’t afford. The car would roar into Winslow’s parking, the doors would open— no, they’d slide straight up, and I’d get out. Still being me. I grimaced, that was the part where the illusion broke down. Money can’t buy happiness, Taylor, I chided. _And it’s not yours_. 

Was that the sound of a car door? It couldn’t be eight already. 

The costume I was sat on went back into the hidey hole, along with the handcuffs that were half closed around my wrist and the fishing line I had stolen, and I sat up straighter as the out-pouring of current suddenly had less places to go. I placed the money that I’d put outside the bag over the costume and still had room to slide the slab back without it being tricky. It was going to be a longer job than I’d expected, to calculate the scale of the blow that had been dealt to the ABB. I needed more than the few hours I got when my Dad worked late on a Friday. 

The important thing was that I didn’t want to put myself at risk if there wasn’t enough money here to justify it. If this wasn’t enough money to go to war for. 

Upstairs, my elbow eased shut the basement door just in time. The clock in the hall showed a quarter past seven. Keys jingled in the door. I sat on the stairs, leaning against the patchy white bannister, which creaked. 

Dad was tall, but his khaki work jacket and his thick soled dock boots made him look larger in the wrong places, ungainly, like a stick insect. I got my weak chin from him, and it made our necks look like they were two inches too long. 

“Taylor!” 

He was looking at me like he hadn’t seen me in a week, but he was frowning too. My arms went around my knees, but I gave him a jaunty, jolly wave as I put my head against the bannister.

He wrapped me in a hug. He smelt of something gas-like, and a little earthy, woody. 

“What happened? Are you ok? When I got the phone call I was so scared.” 

Oh. That. Well, now quarter past seven felt incredibly _late_. 

When he stepped back, I shrugged. “It was a case of wrong place, wrong time. No harm done, to me.” Yet. She’d seen my face after all, even if she was claiming to be a hero now. Still, it would help me later. 

“Have you eaten?” he asked me. 

I shook my head. His hand twitched like he was going to put a hand on my shoulder but thought better of it. He jerked his head, and after a moment I followed him to the kitchen, where the lights buzzed and took three blinks to stay on. The yellow wasn’t kind to my dad, he looked drawn. 

He looked over his shoulder at me as he pulled out chopping boards, and pans with a clatter. Casually, very casually, he said, “So, what happened? You must have been … unlucky.” 

Unlucky. That was one word for it. My escape hadn’t been an escapade; no Count of Monte Cristo mystery. 

I’d pulled my hood down and turned my shoes and ring back to normal. When the green and white flashing lights pulled to a stop, and the troopers shouted at me to get down on the ground, put my hands above my head, and get up against the wall; all at the same time; I snitched. 

‘Purity was here’ came out with an unconvincing gasp, and ‘I think these guys are really hurt’, with a lot more sincerity. But I didn’t want to get into that with Dad. 

“Yeah, just one of those things, I guess.” 

He straightened in a jerk and caught his head on the corner of an open cupboard, and the air turned blue for a minute. “Fuck,” he said at last, in summary. 

“You ok?” I asked. 

“Damn it, Taylor. I should be asking you that.” 

“Sorry,” I said. 

He sighed. Was this a normal daughter-dad dynamic? Dads weren’t ever good at talking to their daughters, right? They were always in over their head. We weren’t anything special. 

The key was smiling. He knew school wasn’t great, I knew work wasn’t great, but we protected each other. We were a team. I could shoulder the burdens of my own life so that he didn’t have to, and if it meant not living through the depredations that Emma had forced on me a second time by telling him then that was fine. I wasn’t too small to admit that there was something in it for me. 

Taking him by the arm I sat him on the chair and looked through his thinning hair. He wasn’t bleeding but there was going to be a nasty bruise. 

“I think you’re going to have to sit this one out,” and I said it like a TV daughter would. ‘I’m off the bench’ died in my throat, too awkward, and I spun on my heel to pick up where he’d left off. 

A chopping board with a crack through it hit the side with a slap, and then some cans from the cupboard. Beans, peas, sliced carrots, some chopped tomatoes. Lasagne sheets, and some El Paso taco shells were all the rest. Not much to work with. 

“Er, I was thinking chilli?” said Dad. He began to lumber up, but I pulled my hair back from my face and gave him a demented smile that I hoped looked less pained than it felt. 

“No help necessary.” I waved my chopping knife for general emphasis and he held his hands up. 

“We do need to talk about what happened, Taylor,” he said. 

I shrugged. “We can talk over dinner.” 

He made a hmm and bought it.

While I cooked my thoughts turned to the money downstairs. More and more it was a struggle to remain in the present, to remain in the house. My mind was always out _there_ , thinking about how to do by myself what the whole Protectorate hadn’t managed in years. The key was the money, and making sure that the gangs knew who had it. We must not have spoken for twenty minutes, but dinner didn’t take long. Dad never seemed to mind the quiet. 

“This is great, Taylor.” He sipped watery chilli from a tablespoon. “Really good.” 

I arranged my face to show I didn’t really believe him, but we were looking at our bowls and I don’t think he saw. 

“So,” he said. 

“Movie?” I asked. “Do you want to watch a movie, as it’s Friday?” Dad frowned. 

I shrugged, “if you don’t want to that’s fine. I’ve got homework to do. I just thought it might be nice to watch something together, like we used to. I kind of want to get out of my own head, after earlier you know?” 

I chanced a glance up at him, and through thick glasses his brown eyes were looking at me, bright and a little sad. “Sure, Owl,” he said, “sure.” 

He took another slurp from his spoon. “The PRT Agent who spoke to me said they’d need a statement from you, soon. But they didn’t really tell me what _had_ been said already, Taylor. Can you?” 

I nodded and shrugged, and pulled at the fraying hem of my hoodie sleeve with one hand. “Yeah, but let’s not ruin dinner. We can talk about it when we’re picking the movie.”

He sighed, softly. “Sure,” he said. 

We watched Cowboys vs. Aliens. It wasn’t very good, but I liked it. Everyone just wanted gold, and that was enough. That justified the whole thing. Mostly we were quiet. 

“Dad, do you want a beer?” I asked. And I scampered to the refrigerator and back. 

He smiled at me. “Well, as you’re offering, kid,” he said. 

I offered two more by the end, and he fell asleep until the gold destroying explosion at the end, because of course there was. 

The ten o'clock news, after the movie, didn’t have much of use, so tidying the kitchen and putting my chilli-soup into little freezer-bags kept me out Dad’s disorientated eyeline, until it was time to chivy him upstairs. 

“This was nice, Taylor,” he said, “we should do it again.” 

“Ahuh, yes Dad,” I said. 

“Do you want to go out tomorrow, we could go to Portland, make a day of it?” 

Sorry Dad, but there’s going to be a gang-war in Brockton Bay this weekend and I don’t want to miss it, I didn’t say. 

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten about our talk, young one.” 

I turned on the light to the bathroom for him. “Well, not tonight.” 

“No, not tonight,” he said. “Night, Taylor.” 

“Night.” And that was another successful Friday in the Hebert household. 

I was near tapping my fingers to distraction by that point. It was gone eleven, and it had been dark for hours. I went and lay in bed. Shaking my foot, I looked up at the ceiling and listened to my Dad clattering around the bathroom. 

His heavy footsteps banged down the hall to the bedroom at the far end of the house. I’d give it an hour, and hopefully with the beer he’d sleep heavily and for most of the night. 

Watching the movie had helped cement my idea as a plan. The ABB knew the Empire had robbed them. And the Empire knew that they hadn’t gotten away with the money. But they didn’t know Hookwolf hadn’t _not_ got away with the money. Or at least, that’s what I’d tell them. 

I jiggled my foot and looked at the LED display of my alarm clock. An hour. One hour. I’d go out in an hour. And I’d solve the gang problem by myself. 

It made sense to me, at least.

***** *****

The cold air hit me like a wet fish to the face, even through the balaclava. Breathing seemed to draw the air through the fabric like needles, so that it stung _more_ not less.

The sky above me was clear, but Brockton was bright enough even in the South Docks that the stars weren’t visible and the sky was a smear of the purple-black that my ring turned into. 

My costume didn’t _look_ different, but it felt different. The parts where I’d stitched it together poorly didn’t strain so much, didn’t feel like they were in danger of tearing if I stretched the wrong way. 

My crystal sneakers’ tone surged in that strange not-sound way, and the burst carried me ten yards down the road. It was coming quicker now, a couple of steps and then a burst, a couple more then a burst again and my steps were springier. I didn’t stumble so much after the dash. 

Captain’s Hill was growing, a darker shadow stabbing into the sky, so my path had to head west. Wait, no, south. Left, whichever compass direction that was. The Empire were in that direction. 

Woburn Corner bordered the hill and it was sort of the Bay’s inbetween district, poor enough that the gang was practically gainful employment, but far enough from the docks that they still cared about their lawns, and the appearance of their houses. 

That was the difference between my neighbourhood and theirs. Theirs looked _nicer_. 

Woburn pre-existed parahumans but the name was old and nordic sounding enough that holding it was a matter of pride to the neo-nazis, and I knew a lot of the shorter-haired seniors at Winslow lived here. Sticking to the sidewalk I passed houses with neatly trimmed gardens separated by unpainted wooden plank fences.

At the corner of Rose and Juniper, I saw what I was looking for. There was a bar, and it looked like a dive. Closer to Commercial Downtown, _Bleachers_ was squeezed between two taller apartment buildings, hemmed in by the street with only a narrow strip of sidewalk as a necklace. 

It was old, the door down steep steps from the sidewalk. A signpost hung proudly. It was embossed with the bar’s name and a logo of a white bird with a cross and a lightning bolt in its center. It wasn’t one I recognised. It _was_ white though, so it was probably the place I was looking for. 

I tapped my fingers against my other arm, where they were crossed. There was no one outside and no cameras I could see. The streets were empty, there were motorbikes parked outside, and muffled rock made it to me, even from across the street. Slowly I crept forwards. I gave my umbrella a few swishes, just to get the weight right. 

This was going to be simple. I was a vigilante. I had seen something I shouldn’t have, and I wanted to tell Purity, but I couldn’t find her. This was information that would hurt Hookwolf but not the Empire, and they’d think it was honest by it. And name dropping Purity would help. The bullies had taught me one thing. People trusted tattletales, especially if they looked like they were enjoying it. 

The windows were thick and blurry, though I could see it was brightly lit inside. Silently, my feet carried me down the steps. My bare fingertips rested on the grimy door, it was cold, and the cold made it feel slick and slippery. Maybe this was a bit _too_ Western an approach, but I couldn’t be scared now, couldn’t back down. I pushed the door open before I lost my nerve. _Quick in and out, Taylor_

Smokey, warm air. Blinding bright light, loud bar talk; suddenly silent. This was my first solo trip to a bar, I realised. I wouldn’t count it, not if they didn’t offer me a drink. It took a moment, but soon they were all looking at me. The music kept playing. 

There were ten or fifteen of them and a barman. All very different looking, but in very similar ways. They were older men, with leathery skin – the sort you got from being in the sun a lot – and leather jackets. One of them, with a long moustache that fell past his chin even had a stars and stripes bandana over greasy hair. The inside of the bar wasn’t 2010, with wooden floors, wooden chairs around splintering table-tops, and a couple of pool tables in the far corner. A vintage jukebox looked in good condition, it was probably worth a lot of money now. 

“Hello,” I said. One or two of them shuffled in place, but hands didn’t drop from behind their backs, and the one on the far side of the pool table slowly took his pool cue up. 

“You’ve come for trouble, you’ll find it gook girl,” said the barman, a skinhead with blue eyes. With a heavy bang he placed a shotgun or a rifle, or something, on the wooden bar. “Better to turn around.” 

I looked at my costume, at my purple vest, my eyes seeing the Asian patterns and tracings that swirled all over the fabric. Ah. The ABB? I could see it. This could still work. 

“I’ve been sent with a message,” I lied. “For the Empire.” 

A younger man, slumped over a stein, not even facing me spoke, “Ain’t no Empire here, pig.” 

A laugh went around the bar. The sort of laugh that didn’t mean anyone was having a good time. A bigger man put a hand on the young guy’s shoulder, and the drunk gang member quieted. I noticed the pictures. On the walls, there were black and white photographs of troops from World War Two, and I didn’t think they were American. 

“Lung wants his money back,” I said. My throat was really dry. This was supposed to be simple and easy. Intimidate them with the mask. Tell them Lung knew what had _really_ happened. Don’t look scared. 

“I’m sure he does,” said the barman, “that’s got nothing to do with us.” 

“Lung knows Hookwolf took the money on Lords Street. He knows that he returned to the fight after he hid it. Lung’s ears know that Hookwolf told the Empire that he lost the money, and he knows Hookwolf lied.” 

No one said anything, no one moved. And then the big guy who had put his hand on the other one’s shoulder picked up the big gun from the bar. Slowly, he brought it to bear on me. 

“I think you better stay where you are,” he said. He was tall, fat and brawny, both, and his face was scarred. 

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” I said. “I’m going to leave now.” 

“No you ain’t,” he said. 

I stood there, he stood there, and nothing happened. I could almost hear people breathing, it was so quiet. I took one, small, step backwards to the door. 

“No,” he warned. 

Still, no one else made to aim their guns at me, or take a step forwards. They were afraid, I realised. They were waiting for whatever Empire villain they’d signalled to come back them up. A new, unknown cape, walking into a bar alone. They thought it might not go well for them if they shot me. 

“I’m white,” I tried, “I’m a teenage girl–” 

“–then you’re on the wrong fucking side, girl.” 

“It’s gonna go very badly for everyone if you fire that gun. I’m not ABB, just someone being leaned on.” 

I took another step backwards. He raised his gun. I raised my umbrella pointing it back at him. Guns came out from every corner slowly. More than a dozen pointed at me, the barrels looked very dark and very large from this side of them. There was a pause.

I leapt backwards through the door, and opened my umbrella as wide as it could go. It was tough. If it was tough enough to resist buckshot and handguns, I didn’t know. There was a bang, louder than I’d expected and the umbrella jerked in my hand, jarring my wrist. But it held. It held. 

I threw it weakly ahead of me, trusting in my power to keep it moving slightly ahead, and _danced_ up the stairs, uncharacteristically graceful as my heart beat blue murder and my stomach lagged behind, then I was away. 

I called my umbrella to me as I dashed and sprinted. With the canopy open it was slow, and it didn’t catch me until I was almost down the street. 

I had learned from Wednesday, I headed to the commercial district, towards the bright lights of the clocktower and Brockton’s few modest skyscrapers. No heading back home until I could be sure no-one was following me. The charge into my untransformed costume stopped with a wrench from me, leaving the enervating current nowhere to drain. If it would give me the second wind I needed or would just make me more erratic in my movements, I didn’t know, but I was willing to roll the dice. 

The sound of the choppers, the old fashioned motorbikes I had seen outside the bar roared out into the air, one then another, in quick succession. Fuck. They were willing to chase me. 

There was no way I could outrun them on a straight road. I was fast, faster than any normal person, but the two steps without a dash were costing me and, averaged out, I doubted I was any faster than a soccer mom’s SUV heading to pilates on a weekday. 

I kept running. My eyes on the clock tower steadily inching closer. Once I was in Downtown then the usual Brockton Bay warren of alleys and close rooftops would come back, and I could escape. Plan A was ‘make it past the Clocktower’. 

The roar of the choppers was getting closer quickly, bouncing off the buildings to my left and right. I chanced a glance over my shoulder, and saw the high-handled bikers maybe fifty yards behind me. 

Plan B, stagger them. 

I spun briefly, and threw my umbrella straight back, as hard as I could, driving it as quickly as it could. I didn’t have time to see how it did, it was probably miles off of the mark, but I dashed for the nearest street corner making sure the parked cars by the sidewalk were between me and them as much as possible. 

The sound of squealing brakes was music to my ear, but there was no crashing, no sound of a bike smashing onto asphalt. 

I called my umbrella back. It met me as I swung around the corner. The next intersection was only twenty yards away so I shot through there. I saw my first car of the chase, stopped at the lights I dashed through. Hopefully, he’d call the PRT, or anyone, when the bikes tore past him. At the very least he’d slow them down, so I turned right, and quickly stopped on the sidewalk, listening to the approaching roar of the bikes. 

The fishing line with prepared loop and slip-knot came out my belt. I’d had vague thoughts to make it a grappling hook somehow, but looking up there was no way I could climb the two-story shop-front next to me before they caught me. 

My umbrella was my grandpa’s from when he was younger, it’d been a gift, and even before my power had enhanced it it was well made. A straight hickory handle was moulded to fit my hand, now, and the tip was a blunted silver spike at the far end. I slipped the line over the handle to the point where it pinched to become the main shaft of the umbrella and pulled it tight. 

The roar of the bikes was almost on top of me now, about to turn the corner. I hurled the umbrella at the far side of the street as they turned the corner, and let the line unspool, the pitch of my power accelerating the throw to the fastest I had seen the umbrella travel. 

They saw me as they turned, breaking and trying to slow, but my umbrella cracked the brickwork opposite and stuck, and I pulled the line taut. It held. The first guy, the big guy with the shotgun hit the trap with his shoulder and started to fall, but he caught on the line, and it cut my hands. I dropped it with a hiss, my umbrella soaring back to my hand. I caught it, spun it, and threw it at the middle of the group.

Shots rang out, I heard glass smash, and the big guy and his bike were hitting the floor, crashing and sliding down the road, while the second biker wobbled, trying to avoid his leader and falling himself. I dashed into the middle of them, those that had almost come to a stop, and called my umbrella.

With a swing, I caught the one who was lining up on me and smashed him in the head. The weird weighty property of my umbrella worked for me, seeming to travel faster than I swung it and he came off his bike, even as it felt like my arm might rip out its socket.

Something bit me, with a bang. A red hot bite, right into my side, and I screamed. I cast my umbrella in that direction and dashed towards the opposite side of the intersection. My umbrella arrived in my hand and I opened it, holding it facing backwards to shield my back as I ran. More gunshots banged, deafeningly loud, like blows themselves, and my umbrella kicked under my arm.

I made it to the next intersection before the bikes sounded like they were heading towards me again. My hip was throbbing. A quick touch under a streetlight showed blood. But not a lot. In fact, the burning wasn’t in my side at all any more; it was my finger that stung, like when ice stuck to bare skin, my ring finger.

I didn’t want to try plan B again. Plan C, hide.

At the intersection, I turned right, back towards the clocktower. The skyscrapers ahead were almost to me, random, small squares of yellow chequered all across their sides. It was getting more brightly lit, the streetlights more common as I got closer to the Bay. I closed my umbrella and threw it at the streetlight closest and smashed it. I got the second, too, but the third I missed.

I was panting. I wasn’t fit enough for this. My finger burned colder.

I heard the choppers turn, slowly, onto my road; just as I reached the next intersection. They were closing. I glanced back as I turned, their headlights dazzling me.

Stupid, so stupid. What was taking out street lights going to do when they had headlights? Would I crouch in a shadowy corner, as they reached the end of the broken lights and turned back? My umbrella slapped into my hand heavily. I rolled my wrist.

I made it to the other corner. My breaths were deep, and heavy. I dashed another step. I probed my side again. I couldn’t outrun them. Panting, I was going to die or, worse, be captured by the Empire.

At the intersection ahead, a car passed through, then another. If only I could drive. There were cars parked on the edges of the street beside me. If only I could drive and hotwire a car I’d have gotten through this.

Raggedly, I dashed ahead, then dashed again. Could I hide behind one of the cars at least, just get out of sight, and hope they’d thought I’d turned at another intersection? I heard the reverberation of the motorcycles engines as they turned the corner behind me and the change in the sound as it no longer echoed around a corner, closer now. A gun fired, and I dashed.

A car passed ahead of me. I did the only thing I could think of, I threw my umbrella backwards blindly, and I dashed for the car, coming to be within half a yard of it as it sped through the intersection perpendicular to me. It was a white Japanese car with a spoiler, an arch over the back of the car big enough for a man to climb under, and I reached to grab it and missed. Two steps and a dash and I managed to hook an elbow around it, jumping so it pulled me with it, painfully wrenching my arm.

I hung to the back of the car like a joey to a kangaroo. I slapped on the trunk as I called my umbrella back.

“Drive! Drive!” It sped up, although I wasn’t sure it was because it had heard me as it started swerving wildly. I slipped from side to side, holding on as it bucked, trying to shake me. My umbrella missed my hand but struck the car and we sped up even faster. I gritted my teeth as the car slid around a corner and tore into Downtown. I couldn’t spare a thought for the motorbikes, if they were closing on me then they deserved it, and I wished them luck in their next European superbike whatever.

If this had been a Bronco or a Mustang it would’ve have been much more on-brand for my evening. Using my umbrella as a handle on the spoiler, I pulled myself higher onto the car.

We hit a slight hill and flew into the air for a second. When the car started to return to the earth, I kept flying. The spoiler I had been holding on to slipped away from me inch by inch.

Somehow I kept my feet under me when I landed, my sneakers seeming to almost twist and turn me like a cat so that it wasn’t my head that hit the ground. I managed to pratfall into a roll, and tumbled across the ground. The car didn’t slow, and in five seconds flat it was gone, screaming around another corner.

I called my umbrella to my hand. There was an alley across the road, next to a fire escape. I dashed to the alley, and then with a run up got a foot onto the wall and dashed up to the first rung of the staircase.

On the roof, the crescent moon smiled down at me, and I collapsed onto my back, breathing heavily while the air started to chill me. The rumble of the Empire’s motorcycles approached... And then I heard them draw away. Safe. I’d lost them. Rolling onto my side, I propped myself up against an air-conditioning unit in the center of the roof. My breathing wasn’t slowing.

The burning in my finger died away, and slowly the pain in my side returned, throbbing, painful. Pulling my costume aside, the formerly white dress shirt sticking to the skin, wetly. There was a jagged, deep hole just above my hip bone. When I breathed in, blood spurted in little pulses.

Fuck.

I was starting to feel faint.

***** *****


	6. 1.5

A/N: Any and all comments welcomed. What can I do to make this better? Are there parts of the story letting it down? Any questions about what’s occurring? As always

**1.5**

***** *****

“Evening,” I said. _Just ignore me_ , I thought. I cut a dashing figure, limping along the sidewalk with blood dribbling through my fingers and down my left side.

“It’s three, girl. You out for a good time?” She wasn’t all there, her eyes too big for her head, her skin cratered, and her hair thin. She took wobbling steps across the street towards me. 

I ignored her, and tried to walk past, but apparently I was too interesting to pass up. She was wearing very little but, although our breath was frosting and my fingertips were numb, she didn’t seem to feel it. 

“Go away.” I said, firmly. 

I waved my umbrella in front of my face to say ‘ _look at the mask, look at the crystal umbrella, I’m real_ ’, but she only stepped closer. Moving my umbrella hurt. I gasped, pressed my hand to my side more tightly. The wound wasn’t … good. I didn’t feel well, nauseated; my toes tingled. 

“Look, just leave me alone.”

“Honey, you don’t look well.” 

She stopped when I jabbed the umbrella tip against her chest. I did it again and she took a step back. I was more worried about the car that was parked across the street from us. In it, a man was staring at us both, and he didn’t look friendly. The down-on-her luck lady in front of me had gotten out the same car. Her John or her pimp or whatever wasn’t white, so I wasn’t worried he was Empire, but that didn’t I mean wasn’t worried. Girls went missing in Brockton Bay at night. They had for years. 

“Step back. I’m a cape.” She frowned like she didn’t believe me, or understand me. 

The umbrella kept her at arm’s distance so that I could limp on toward the Bay. I was in Downtown proper now. There were parts I recognised but it was in brief flashes. I didn’t have much reason to come down here on foot often. 

She stepped forward again, keeping just beyond my reach. “You need a hospital, honey. We got a car.” 

The road behind my shoulder was clear, I thrummed the power in my sneakers and dashed ten yards back. Then another ten. Her mouth opened in a gasp that wasn’t audible from here and it was strangely gratifying. She _hadn’t_ thought I was a real one. Had she thought the shadowy shoes and umbrella were a trick of the light? Not anymore. No one had been impressed by me before. 

Dashing with quick looks back at her I didn’t stop till I was one street over, but I paid for it, the strain on my wound causing it to bleed more heavily. 

She wasn’t wrong. I _needed_ a hospital, I just couldn’t go to one. Not with a gunshot wound and a piece-meal costume they’d need to take off. 

I didn’t know where I was again, I was cold, and I was bleeding. If I made it through this, I swore by everything holy that I would fill my belt with everything I could think of, everything that could possibly be useful. And then when it was full I would squish _more_ swabs and bandages in. 

A deep breath, Taylor, make it to the Bay, everything will be fine. Make it to the Bay and you can follow Lords Street home. The broad street would be brightly lit, and I wouldn’t have to worry about being jumped every time the gap between two street lights was just a little too long. It was with cautious optimism that my plan assumed I wouldn’t encounter two shoot-outs on the same street in the same week.

The thought brought a flash of the ganger in the alley to me, Hookwolf’s arm through him like a shish kebab, his blood pouring out onto the brickwork. 

I felt my eyes sting but I was in no mood to let myself fucking cry. OK, I’d been shot. OK, I was limping through the city being harassed by pimps. OK, I had two miles or more to walk while my side burned like fire, but I deserved it. I’d been stupid, unforgiveably stupid. I _wasn’t_ Dauntless. I couldn’t take out a villain in a single thunder-blow of lightning. I’d walked into a bar of armed Nazis and threatened them. What a _fucking_ – Genius– Idea. 

I was lucky I hadn’t died. My side gave out a painful twinge as I twisted, and I gasped. _Don’t speak too soon, you might get your wish,_ I thought. Still, the devil on my shoulder said, it might have been worth it. They’d obviously, unfortunately, bought that I was a new ABB cape. Hopefully they’d report what I said to their leadership. 

The sweatpants that made up the lower half of my costume had pockets and my right hand rubbed its fingers together to keep warm. Brockton Bay made its meagre tourism money on the common knowledge that it had weirdly mild winters: little frost, rare snows. The fine rain beginning to bead on my venetian mask and soak through my pants onto my legs hadn’t got the memo. A great wrack of a shiver shook through me, and it pulled at my wound, and the pain paralysed me for a second more. 

“You’ve got to go to the hospital, Taylor,” I said. But I shook my head, I _couldn’t_. I couldn’t get caught. I just needed to get home. 

I made it two streets further to the coast before the shivers had sapped me too much not to compromise. There was a green pharmacy cross on the side of the skyscraper on this block. The bottom few stories were the white stone that made up most of the buildings in Downtown, but from the fourth storey upwards it was all mirror glass. High up it could catch the pearlescent light of the Rig’s forcefield, out in the bay, and it was trippy. 

Concerning, I didn’t normally think things like ‘trippy’. The pharmacy was a twenty-four seven place, but it was empty when I went in, of customers at least. 

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. The small space was crowded with too many rows, and looked smaller in the harsh light that lit the sterile aisle floor from long humming strips on the ceiling. 

“The police are on the way, you should leave. I cannot access the till.” A young Indian man’s head was just visible over a stack of Funyuns barricading the counter. 

I sighed. “I’m not a thief, I’m a hero,” I said. He didn’t reply.

The display closet had some tweezers that looked useful, some alcohol gel, and thick pads of gauze and they all went into my belt neatly. Looking around, I saw what looked like a very large sticking plaster, a dressing, that could go over the top. I didn’t have the mental energy to add it up, and I only had ten dollars on me. I didn’t feel too bad about ripping him off though, as he’d called the cops. 

“Thanks for the help,” I said. The buzzer went off again as I left. 

With a dash and a gasp, I was back at the street corner, and I headed to the Mobil sign that spun in the distance. What I needed was a bright light, and a little privacy. I had this. If I didn’t then at least I’d be close to the pharmacy again. Once the police had left. 

The gas station’s bathroom wasn’t locked. Inside, the lights were bright but they were blue, and it threw shadows strangely, the light messing with distance, making everything look strange.

There was only one stall in there and when I looked inside I almost gagged. Not there. Purity’s voice came to me again, ' _It’s not glamorous, is it?_ ’. She wasn’t wrong. 

Perching on the sink so that my left hip was pointed at the mirror there, I lifted up the loose parts of my vest, and unbuttoned the bottom of my once-white dress shirt so that I could see my now-blue skin. As I pulled the shirt open the imagined core—always passing through and around itself in some ‘felt’ way, generating its oily, cold current—snapped into a different shape suddenly, directing its power through my body rather than out into the costume. 

At 3 _a_. _m_. the extra energy was needed. 

I’d bled a lot. I could see it, down my leg, half-scabbing over my sweatpants. A huge mass of crusting red. It was still sticky. A first aid class would be much higher on my list when I made it home, however much it cost me. I didn’t have the first clue what I was doing. 

Cleaning the wound seemed a good start. The gauze packets got lined up against the sink, and I washed my hands as well as I could. The gloves weren’t something that came off without taking the whole costume down. I was pretty confident no-one would come in at this time of night, but then I’d been sure that my visit to the bar was going to be a quick in and out, too. The costume stayed on. 

Tearing the packet open, one swab got soaked with alcohol gel before wiping at the blood on the skin around the hole. There was still blueish blood dribbling out, even despite the scabbing. Four swabs later, I was ready for the wound. 

Liquid fire, and a knife. A hot poker, right in my side. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t, it was too much. The alcohol burned like hell, but moving it was worse. There was still something in there. 

I put one of my packs in my mouth, because the wounded got a stick to bite on in the movies, and tried again. I bit down, but even as the agony came, I persevered. And then my ring finger burned, and turned cold, like ice, and my side didn’t hurt any more.

Odd. 

I rolled back the glove on that finger, from where it ended at the second knuckle until it was closer to the back of my hand and the ring was plainly visible. In all the time that my ring had been able to be transformed it had looked paranatural but metal. Like dark adamantine or orichalcum, like amethyst, in shadow, grown in a solution of copper. Weird, but _solid_. 

Now the ring had turned incorporeal, and little filaments whipped around it like tiny jellyfish tentacles looking for prey. All the shadow-stuff that had lived inside its dark body was bleeding out, and the ring itself now nearly translucent, the same kind of shadow-stuff as my sneakers. 

I could _hear_ it, I realised. The pitch of it, ringing along with that constant tone of my transformed sneakers and umbrella. It wasn’t where I’d normally throw my power’s voice. It was a slighter, tinnier reverberation, and it came to me why it had never done anything when I’d tried in the past! 

I quieted it, back to normal, and flinched, pulling my finger away from where it had been nail deep in my bullet wound. Ouch. I activated it again, and the chill returned to my finger, and the pain vanished. 

This was useful. This was very useful. Whether it was doing something to the wound as well was unclear in the blue light, but just the loss of pain was enough for me. 

I poured alcohol into the wound, until it started to spill out over my skin in a slimy mess. Screwing up a clean gauze pad, I pushed it in and spun it like I was washing a deep glass in the sink, getting the disinfectant out again. It was fascinating, without pain, and ghoulish. I was going to have nightmares about this. 

The tweezers came out next and, pinched shut, I pushed them into the wound. In. Further in. More than halfway. I even touched my back quickly, to make sure I’d not missed a hole on the other side, but it was clear. 

There was a faint sensation as the tweezers tinked against whatever was left in me. Digging around let me get a firm grip. Then it was out. I held it in my palm. It was so little, yet if it had landed somewhere else, or if more than one bullet of the dozens that had been shot at me had hit… I’d be dead. 

I put some gauze into the wound, packing it tight, making sure there was still a good tuft poking out of me for when I next looked. Two more swabs went over the top, then the dressing I had taken. It was a large blister plaster it seemed, but it did the job of holding everything in. 

Tentatively, the ring was allowed to reform into its usual form. The shock of pain that washed through put an end to that. A cold finger was much more preferable, at least till I got home. 

The costume’s charge resumed when the last button snugged it closed. I used a little water to try and wash the blood off the vest and sweatpants but gave up. It was going to take more than gas station treatment. 

Outside in the cold air, free of pain, I breathed deeply, I smiled. With my ring masking the pain, it wouldn’t be much to walk home now, or to fight off stoned passer-bys. My bed lay before me, and a long, long sleep. 

Above me, the black sky turned grey and the stars became small and thready. At great speed a star arced over the city towards the North; brighter than a comet. Purity. Quick steps took me to the center of the road to see her descending somewhere up near the Docks, near ABB territory. She wasn’t alone. A few moments later, a faint light passed over the city from the sea, like heat lightning. Dim from this far but tracing through the air like lightning, clearly electrical. It had to be Dauntless. 

I groaned, and swung my umbrella in their general direction. I checked the strength of my dressing. The answer to one stupid course of action was not another stupid course of action.

[i]I’ll just go and see what’s happening.[/i] I lied to myself.[i] I’ll just look[/i]. Then I set off, dashing down the street in the direction of the Docks.

***** *****

Running through ABB land at night wasn’t fun. The streets were narrow in what passed for Tokyotown in the Bay, and the Japanese culture was on display everywhere. Before the Leviathan’s passing and Japan’s decline, I’m sure Tokyo itself couldn’t have looked as Tokyo as this. Lanterns crossed the street on strings, the sidewalk was partitioned by extended shop fronts that would be filled with Asian groceries in the morning. There were even one or two pedal-driven rickshaws parked on the road, although I’d never seen them anywhere else in the city in my life.

Most importantly, compared to the rest of the Bay, Tokyotown wasn’t entirely asleep. Light spilled from the door of still open restaurant-slash-bar as I detoured to find another street through. This was becoming frustrating. 

The alleys were dark and uninviting, and the rooftops were all different heights, made irregular by sporadic and unplanned additions. There were a lot of ABB around, but most of the time I saw them before they saw me. They wore their colors, or a certain fashion of denim jacket, or they had some tattoos, or even just had worn faces, but you could always tell who they were. Mostly, they just had hard eyes. They drank, or laughed or shouted, or were silent, but they all had hard eyes, and they sat around plastic tables or wandered in and out of buildings all over the district. 

The ABB didn’t go in quite so much as elsewhere for on-the-street dealers, and that was the only reason I’d made it this far in without having to decide whether to fight or fly. It was ironic, perhaps, that the newest gang in the Bay was the most similar to the New England gangs of old, communities formed around a shared heritage more than drugs or money. 

Prowling through a back alley, a high-pitched scream came from a window three floors above me. I scowled. In some horrific things, however, they were as money-focused as the worst gangs of Los Angeles. 

Getting closer to where I had last seen Purity in the sky it became clear that whatever was going down wasn’t in a residential area at all. The cracks of pistol fire came from a dark expanse ahead, the trainyard. 

The trainyard was an extensive warren of railways to the north of the city, a remnant of when Brockton Bay had been a functional port city, with a lot of freight to haul. Mostly the place was empty during the day, and at night none of its business was legitimate. The train yard had seen its share of gang violence. That was something I had known even before I got my powers. 

The Slaughterhouse Nine had done things here, on their one trip to the Bay, when I was four. Another shiver. That as much as anything was the reason few outside the gangs used it any more. 

I left Tokyotown behind me and crept into darkness. A chain link fence marked the boundary, and it only took a few minutes before a section pulled away where it had been cut. It didn’t take long before there were flickers of brightness again.

Purity burned star-bright on the far side of slumbering train cars and flat beds, her light stabbing out between any gap, and making the world either blinding bright or near pitch back. Every part of the trainyard was only defined by those margins where it met her light or was otherwise completely depthless and formless. There was no keeping my night vision. 

I wound closer, keeping behind the cars where I could or ducking along the flat-beds, to get near. It was a long way, maybe 500 yards, and although my sneakers made no noise themselves my footsteps over track displaced the gravel between the sleepers with too-loud crunches. 

I stubbed my toe on the rail track and fell, and caught my shin on the other side, and sat there sucking air in through my teeth, until my ring caught on. It chilled so much that I had to imagine the air would be misting, if I’d been able to see it more clearly. 

Crawling down the camber to the next car, I heard them before I saw them. Whatever Purity and Dauntless were doing, it was lost in the sound of rapid gunfire, whirring machinery and, above even all of that, the sound of a man’s voice screaming profanities and taunts. 

I chanced a glance around the train car. 

Ahead of me, maybe a 100 yards away, Purity was dodging and flying at her quickest, which was pretty damn quick. Long noon-day shadows spun and turned and it was very difficult to figure out what she was fighting. 

It was big. Set onto a flat-bed on the rails, it looked like… well, it looked like a _gigantic_ cannon but also a train. Except, it was camouflaged, all greens, blues and greys like combat fatigue pants. The whirring sounds came from there, and the gunfire too. It’s enormous barrel was moving up and down, left and right, trying to lock onto Purity and the heroes that were here, but they were all too fast. 

Still, I watched as a double-helix of light erupted from Purity’s general incandescence, and was intercepted by a burst of gunfire. The laser somehow detonated by a burst of fire shot from the body of the railway gun. 

Purity wasn’t alone, there were two heroes with her. In a blue skin-tight leotard with a full helmet on her head, and glowing circuitry all over her body, Battery. One of the Protectorate’s three heroines, she stood there, the lights on her costume growing brighter and brighter while Purity attacked, before she blurred forward almost faster than I could see. She made it to the gun but when she struck it something happened and she flew back just as fast, striking the empty carriage next to me with a riotous bang, crumpling the metal. 

There was a glowing line, it seemed, washed out for being so close to Purity, but _there_. Drawn along the lowest parts of the cannon. That could only mean–

“Cocksucker, you crusty ass star-sucking skank ho. Come here and I’ll–” mercifully cut short by another laser-spiral and gunfire. Skidmark, leader of the Archer’s Bridge Merchants, mostly just called the Merchants. The scabbiest, most disgusting gang in Brockton, but also the weakest. Though you couldn’t tell it at the moment; the cannon whirring as it turned to get Battery in its sights. 

There was a crackle in the air, a charge I could feel on the hairs of my screen and then _he_ was there, protecting her. Dauntless. Dressed like an Ancient Greek hoplite. He stood in the air, his feet covered in lightning, his left arm, too, and in his right hand he held the Arclance. A spear of living storm, it flickered and snapped before he swept it at Skidmark where his head was above the parapet. 

I ducked back. The Merchants, with a giant railway gun. Two protectorate heroes, and Purity. How could I help? 

There didn’t seem to be any normal Merchant gang members willing to be between the cannon and the heroes (and Purity, I refused to group her with them). Maybe I could help there. 

Guns smelled like rotten eggs, like sulfur. It stuck in my nose as I circled around. Maybe I’d get lucky and Skidmark’s tinker, one of only two parahumans in the city who could build this sort of monstrosity, would be somewhere behind the line, too. I might not be able to fight many capes successfully, but an unaware tinker in a workshop, while they followed the battle just outside? I was certain that wouldn’t be too big a challenge. 

Purity shot up sharply into the sky, casting light down, and that was the only reason I didn’t stand on him. She shot down on the far side of the gun, the world went dark, and a hand grabbed my foot. 

“Psst.” 

I smacked him with the umbrella and felt it connect. Three blows hitting somewhere soft. 

“Stop! Fuck. Stop! We’re on the same side, man.” Even shouting, he drew his words out long, got his mouth around the syllables and made them long. He didn’t sound too bright. 

I didn’t answer. Still practically blind, I threw my umbrella away so he couldn’t get it while I restrained him, numb fingers scrabbling for my handcuffs. Reaching down, my fingers hit stubble, a beard or his head maybe, I felt his shoulders, found his back and put a knee down to hold him in place. Except, he’d turned to his side it seemed and it was his ribs I was kneeing, and he jerked in pain and we fell into a tangle. Shit. I jabbed an elbow at him and rolled quickly. From the crunching of the gravel, he found his feet as I found mine. 

“Yo, yo, yo. Chill, man. Chill. Squealer?” The light flashed over us again, and I saw him. A sandy blonde haired man, in a thick jacket. A cheap black domino mask hung askew over his face, then it was dark again. 

Who was Squealer? The Tinker? This could be useful, if he were actually a parahuman and not just a decoy.

“Err, yeah. I’m Squealer,” I said. “Where are you going? We need to get back to the...” I cast an arm at the direction I had been heading, but I didn’t know if he could see it. He was just a blurry shadow again. 

He snorted, then laughed out loud in my face. “Nah man, you ain’t Squealer. You’re that Ward chick, ain’t you?”

“No I’m not,” I said. Quietly, I crept left, trying to get it so that the railway track was behind him, getting ready to give him a good push. 

“I’m just an artist for hire, dude. I don’t know nothing. They just paid me to make shit look lit. They’re all that way, so just…” 

Purity’s light covered us again, and the artist-for-hire was making ‘go away’ hands, before it vanished again. He jerked as he saw I’d moved. Shit. 

I heard the gravel crunch as he tried to get away. If he was some street artist the PRT would let him go. If he was some Merchant parahuman trying to sneak around the back and get the drop on the Heroes, and Purity… I couldn’t let that happen. 

I opened the handcuffs. I transformed them, turning them crystalline and dark. The light covered us again, at the worst possible moment, and he saw me, his eyes gone wide.

I dived, grabbing him by the waist. Except I weighed maybe 110 pounds wet through, and he didn’t fall. I held on grabbing at his belt, his shirt, thrashing trying to throw him, but he took step after step, further towards the Heroes. 

“I’m not fighting a Ward, bitch,” he said.

“I’m not a Ward!” I said, and I dropped to his ankle, snapping the handcuff around one leg. 

He fell before I could grab his other ankle. 

“Man, I can’t kick you in the head, you’re like thirteen! What am I gonna’ do, just get off, man!” 

A cold hand grabbed mine where it was pulling at his other leg, and his free leg slipped out my grasp. 

“I’ll shout!” I shouted. 

“Come on, man,” he said. And then he was rolling over and over, like he was tumbling down a hill, and I couldn’t hold on to the handcuff. He was going to get free. 

I snapped it onto my wrist. 

“Got you!” I said. 

He was facing the battle and I was facing the city. He stood and I hunched, my left hand bound to his ankle. The burning chill in my finger was more noticeable, now my hand couldn’t move. 

“This is cray, Ward chick.” 

“Lift your leg up,” I said. He obliged and I straightened, but then he wobbled and put a hand on my shoulder. 

I growled. “Get your hand o–” 

I flinched. A great explosion, a noise so loud you felt it hit you like a blow, and ring your head like a cymbal. The Railway Gun had fired. But it hadn’t worked, or had been stopped, because now there was bright orange light, the light of a fire, heat washing over me, and I could see a tower’s worth of greasy, thick smoke rising up into the sky, the light from the fire and Purity reflecting off it. Fuck. They needed back up. 

We’d fallen onto the track. “Shit. Are you ok?” asked my perp. 

“Lie down on your front,” I said.

He shook his head. I reached across my body and pulled on his hand so that he rolled. While the handcuffs were like this I could open and close them with a pulse, and I opened them now so that I didn’t fall with him.

He was quick though. He was up before I could properly kneel on him, or maybe I’d just overestimated my weight again, and he took off, running right towards the fire. I guess hoping that I wouldn’t follow him into a cape fight. Idiot.

I followed. He still had my handcuffs on his wrist, and I wasn’t going to lose them, I’d spent a month of time on them. He was fast, but regular human fast, and that was no match for a dash. 

I caught him on the edge of the battleground proper. My umbrella was still on the ground somewhere, so I kicked out at his knee and it [i]worked[/i]. My foot hit his knee just as it started to bend and he collapsed like a wet noodle, spilling onto the ground in a mess. 

Where he passed the ground turned colorful. Stones turning bright purple, yellow, pink, and green. Bright even in the light of the fire. He actually was a cape, too. My eyebrows rose, despite myself. This could’ve gone wrong. Again. 

I dove on him and wrestled his arms behind his back, with a click, both cuffs closed shut. Finally. He spluttered, his face in the gravel. The Railway Gun was ruined, a smoking wreck, but the battle had moved on. 

Battery was nowhere to be seen, and I could see Purity further on in the trainyard. She was flying away, chasing after something. Dauntless, in his bronze armor and tufted helmet stood in the air, harrying the fleeing villains with jabs of his Arclance. Or at least he had been. He turned to look at us as I secured the Merchant villain. 

“Freeze. Hands up!”

He was _talking_ to me. I called my umbrella to hand. This was it. I wasn’t ready, it was too soon, but it was happening anyway. What would he say when I explained myself, when I showed him how similar we were?

“Stop!” he shouted. The umbrella hit my hand, and I used it to push myself up. 

“He’s not going anywhere,” I called back. “You go af–”

I was hit. A crackle of lightning even before I realised what was happening, a shock that ran through me, and everything locked up. 

I couldn’t even shout. All my muscles went tight in a spasm and I fell. And then it hit my power, in the center of me. There was thunder.

Everything went wrong.

***** ***** 


	7. 1.6

**1.6**

***** *****

Dauntless’ Arclance hit me and I _fizzed_ with current, every muscle working, my eyes rolling, the world turning white. His power touched my own, it took to the cold, oily current inside me like water and carried to the core. Everything went wrong.

I collapsed. I seized. It must have been a very short amount of time. I didn’t know. It was white, thoughtless. Pain came back first, all my body hurting, then the gravel pressing against my face through my balaclava. My teeth ached, and my gums. They really, really ached. 

Dribble smeared on the fabric of my mask, sticky on my cheek. Disgusting. I choked, flopped onto my front and looked around, the train yard blurry but sharpening into colour. 

My arrest was getting away. Stumbling out of the clearing, the Merchant artis— the Merchant _villain_ was running on unsteady legs into the darkness. His arms were still behind his back. A flicker of light reflected off his wrists. My handcuffs! That fuck! 

I worked numb feet into standing, pushing up on tingling fingers. He was getting away. What was Dauntless doing?! Why the hell had he attacked me? The villain paused at the flat-car we had fought next to, turned left, and staggered into the darkness. Hidden by a hulking railway carriage, half crumpled from where Battery had slammed into it earlier, he disappeared. My dry throat chased him with a hoarse cry, my tongue too drunk to manage words. 

I had to stop him. I had to get my handcuffs back. I summoned my umbrella and called on my sneakers, but nothing happened. Lightning sounded behind me, in staccato repeating cracks, but my eyes were fixed on my feet. Something was wrong. My sneakers were normal, black fabric and thick laces. My umbrella lay on the floor, the straight hickory handle and black canopy ending in a silver tip. No hint of crystalline mineral, no eldritch, otherworldly shadow colouring. 

It was gone. My power was broken. 

The ground trembled and almost shook me off my feet. Staggering behind me was Dauntless. He had gone mad. 

He was trapped inside a crackling sphere of electricity, and the air smelled very noticeably sharp. Clean, and stinging, like the chlorine Dad kept under the sink when we’d still helped Grandpa with his pool. It was O-zone. I didn’t want to let whatever he was doing touch me, or to breathe too deeply. I might not have much choice. 

Dauntless was leaping over the clearing in fits and bursts. He smashed into the wreckage of the railway gun and sunk into it. It screamed, it turned red, then the edges closest to him turned white; crackling discharge streaming over the track underneath in flickering arcs. 

Fucking … sh— _fuck_.

The cannon melted enough that he could work his way free and he rose into the air erratically, still hidden behind the crackling forcefield. Ten feet up he jinked into the ground suddenly then bounced back into the air. 

Come on umbrella. Come on. The pitch, the resonance, that always rang underneath its surface was absent. I couldn’t feel anything of me in it. The current that had become a part of me, as much taken for granted as my heartbeat, was now completely gone; the core inert. Still. Something about Dauntless’ attack had fucked both of us up, in a big way. 

I stepped back, turning to get behind cover. It must have drawn his attention, whyever he’d attacked me it didn’t look like he’d changed his mind. He shot towards me by turns, zig-zagging in the sky. It slowed him just enough that my desperate dive to the ground dodged him and he slammed into a train car. His passing made all the hair on my arms stand up.

Come on sneakers. Maybe I could draw the power from them back into myself, restart the core? But there was nothing to feel, nothing that I could manipulate. There was only that solid part in the center of me, unturning, cold and dead. 

Dauntless jerked into the sky, and suddenly his field contracted, pulling into concentric rings around his arm. In his hand the Arclance was lunging wildly, and free of the field it struck out as he gained height. It was like he was holding a hose with too much pressure. His arm whipped back and forth, and the Arclance traced lines all over the sky and the train yard, before the shield expanded again.

He plunged down just as I got my feet under me, and the impact shook the ground. He wasn’t himself, I was certain this wasn’t him in a rage. His power was just as broken as mine, and now he was a bull in a china shop. Without powers, I was a thinner china figurine than the freight car he had just ripped through. Time to go, to get out of here, before he launched himself at me again. There was nothing I could do to stop him, no way to try and contain him. Two stupid decision in one night was enough for me. I wasn’t going to make a third by taking him on. 

My side stung, but it was barely noticeable, my breath was coming so fast. Even though the pain was pushed back by the adrenaline—the pain noticeable, but ignorable, in a way it hadn’t been when the ring acted on it—the muscles Dauntless’ Arclance had tasered couldn’t just shrug it off. 

There was no way I was getting out of this by running. 

There was a sheet of metal on the ground ahead that could maybe serve as a shield from his power. Wide but not too thick, and rusty, even in the weak, actinic light of Dauntless’ power.

The ground churned. He was rolling at me, halfway stuck into the ground, I realised. Slowly his field was crunching through the soil and gravel, chewing in my direction. I hobbled faster. I needed to get out of his way, and I needed something to push on if his shield came close to me again. 

The metal panel was cold, clumsy fingers lifted it and it was clear it didn’t weigh too much for me. Not more than 20 pounds maybe, and it was wide. It would cover my upper body. The metal landed flat ways down, and Dauntless was closing in. 

I was trusting in my umbrella again. Even without it being accessible my power had to still be in there. Just because it couldn’t do anything spectacular right now didn’t mean my time charging it had been for nothing. My power didn’t give things a new form until it had made them as durable and as quality as it could. It was why Mom’s silver ring wasn’t silver anymore, and why my umbrella canopy had blunted my dad’s hack-saw before I even knew any of my charged objects could ever get a second form. 

I took the hickory handle in both hands and held it like a staff, point down. With a grunt I drove it as hard as I could, spearing the tip into the metal. It stuck. It shouldn’t have, I wasn't that strong, but the umbrella formed a long handle. With the umbrella tucked under my arm, my shield was ready. Not a second too late, the _bzzrt_ and whine of his power lashing out was on me. The shield bucked in my grip where the flicker of a streamer licked out at the steel. 

Facing him, I stumbled backwards, as fast as I could without falling. If I could get behind a train cart and turn a corner then there was no chance he could follow me. Not when he was finding it so difficult to even go in a straight line. I would just have to hope he didn’t destroy too much in trying. 

The handle jerked in my armpit. The faint smell of smoke. The handle was hot, getting warmer. My shield was still taking charge despite the wood, I realised, and I wasn’t gaining ground quickly enough. 

Legs burning, trying to eke out as much crampy, discoordinated speed as possible, the corner of the passenger cart came near. I pushed the shield back at Dauntless, hoping that his field was solid enough that his advance would speed me on, that the kickback would help me along. It did. Too much. 

The push took me off my feet, and I fell onto my back. I rolled. The edge of his field was two yards away, the smell of that clean, _sharp_ air was overwhelming. 

She appeared, in a blur or blue and greys, and struck his bubble. Dauntless rocketed back across the clearing like a foosball ball, bouncing off the ground and knocking into a freight cart fifty yards away. This time he didn’t get stuck, flying up immediately. 

Battery stood there, her back to me, not chasing. She was solid, unmarked, still. Her costume began to glow more and more brightly, and I saw her straighten. She had two fingers to the side of her helmet. 

“Dauntless, stay still.” 

He shot sideways, before veering down into the ground again with a boom. “If it slows you down, good. Can you use the lance to steer at all?” There was a moment’s pause, Dauntless presumably answering. 

She blurred forward and wrestled with the bubble. Hammer-fast blows and then a lunge with her fingers straight like a knife, but she couldn’t get through the field. She shot back across the clearing again, to where she had been before. She stood over me, and the circuitry style that traced all over her blue leotard began to grow bright again.

Her mirror-visor covered her eyes, black in the low-light. She was facing me this time, looking down on where I’d fallen. Her fingers touched the helmet’s side again. 

“Understood,” she said. “I’ll get her to undo whatever this is.” 

An ant could no more have resisted her. She took a wrist in each hand and I was pulled up, before she took me in a bridal carry and we were off. The wind whipped at my face, we passed Dauntless to my left and then we were turning sharply, then straight, then turning again, cutting deep into the dark labyrinth of the train yard. The stop was sudden and painful. I’d managed to hold onto my umbrella shield, mostly by dint of how tightly she’d gripped my hands. It flew off onto the ground now, as she stopped. If she hadn’t held me like an infant, I would’ve carried on into the passenger car in front, like a crash dummy into a windshield. 

She dumped me on the floor, jumped back to build some distance before I had my wits about me, and then the glowing of her costume began to illuminate us so that I could see again. 

“You’ve got the wrong idea,” I said, “I didn’t do this.” 

“Tell me, quickly,” she said. She wasn’t attacking, which was good. I tried to figure out where to start. She growled. Her voice was quite high, higher than mine, and she sounded young. I hadn’t expected it. It didn’t suit a growl, I thought. 

“Errr–”

Like the winter sun on time-lapse, a sudden definition of long shadows shrinking small heralded Purity’s return. She appeared overhead and undid Battery’s work to hide us. She dropped down next to the heroine and I covered my eyes. Battery didn’t. She kept her gaze fixed firmly on me.

“What’s happened?” she asked. “You turned back and they went off-road. Who’s Dauntless fighting, should I engage?”

“The Protectorate cannot include unregistered parahumans in joint action,” snapped Battery, still not looking at her. 

“Yeah,” she sighed, “you said that before I stopped Skidmark from firing into the city, too. I’m still here.” 

“She’s done something to Dauntless, I’ve got to know what.” Battery pointed a finger at me. It was all that Purity needed. She flared up, so bright that I couldn’t see in her direction. Was this what it looked like when she readied her laser-bolts? 

“Purity,” I said, desperately. “We’ve met. I’m a hero, like you.” Not my finest choice of words. Battery was going to think I was a Nazi, but there were things higher on my list right now. “We met on Wednesday, when you took down the ABB.” 

She dimmed. “You’re the girl who’s bad at roof running.” 

“Terminally,” I said. 

She dimmed more. Bright spots marred my vision but it came back quickly enough that I could see Battery after a moment, crouched down, eye level with where I was spilled on the ground. 

“She’s new,” said Purity, “she’s a kid, but she wants to be a hero.” She paused, “an independent hero,” she added. 

Battery took it in her stride. “Hero to hero,” she said, “what did you do? You won’t be in any trouble if you can fix it.” 

“I didn’t _do_ anything,” I said, “He attacked me with the Arclance, I’ve no idea why, and when he did both our powers broke. Mine stopped working and his went…” I waved an arm in the direction of the noise of shrieking metal. 

“Powers don’t break,” said Purity, from over Battery’s shoulder. 

“Thank you, Purity,” said Battery. “Can you keep a look-out.” There was a too long half-second. “Please. We should have Protectorate support arriving. Let me know when.” 

Purity rose into the sky, and it was a little easier to talk without her light burning into my skull. 

“What’s your name?” 

Umbral, Eclipse, Indomitable, and two dozen more flashed through my mind but they were all stupid and meaningless now I was without my power. Battery reached out, recklessly, considering what had happened to Dauntless, and put her hand on my shoulder. 

“I don’t have one yet,” I said. “Look, I don’t know what happened, but I think he saw me take down a Merchant and got the wrong idea. He zapped me and then he lost control.” 

“Will it wear off?” she asked. 

From above, Purity called down. “Battery, he’s seen me.” 

Battery grasped my shoulder tightly. “Will it wear off?” she asked urgently. 

“I don’t know!” I said. 

Except. Except, inside, the movement had started, it had when she touched me, I realised. Slowly, but it was there, speeding up in a way that I could feel. The crystal had started to turn again. It wasn’t gone. My power wasn’t gone. Shot, tased, aching, and in hero custody, a weight lifted off my shoulders. I was still important, I still had a chance to do something with my life. 

“Yes,” I said. “It’ll wear off.” 

“Stay here,” said Battery. The wrenching scream of metal rent by his crashing got closer, I could hear the zap of his power latching onto metal, that high pitch whine like a band-saw at full speed.

“I can help,” I said. 

“Stay. Here.” And she punctuated each word with a stab of her index finger at the ground.

With a leap, Battery was on top of the nearest train car. She spoke to Purity, but her voice carried. “Keep him contained, don’t hurt him.” 

Faintly, drifting forward now, “You can rely on me.” 

Battery blurred and was gone, and with Purity following the light faded back to dark. 

I had to stay. Whatever had happened to Dauntless, I had to explain it wasn’t his fault. I had to explain Purity didn’t know me because I was a _Nazi_. A passenger car further to my left crashed to the ground, knocked off the train tracks and I flinched back. I scrambled onto the flat bed behind me, but nothing else happened. I heard crashes and bangs, I saw light. 

I had to stay. Battery had asked me to stay.

I felt around the flat-bed and found my umbrella. It was still inert, but just holding it was enough for now and I pulled it from from the panel. From the back of the flatbed to the tracks again, I put some more distance between myself and the light of the noise. I would still be in sight when they finished.

Over the sound of searing lightning and laser, and the bass of heavy blows against metal, there was a lighter noise from behind me. 

There was nothing visible, but I heard a crunch. A footstep in gravel, maybe? I didn’t see anything, gnawing my lip. Then there was a flicker for a second, of something reflected maybe. 

It couldn’t be him. He had to have escaped by now, right? Surely the Merchant villain couldn’t still be wandering around the train yard. I took a footstep despite myself, then another. He had my handcuffs. I couldn’t _leave_ them. I couldn’t let someone steal something so important to me again. 

I ventured into the labyrinth of the train yard. Heading towards the battle earlier had been easy, light had moved on the far side of the cars and pointed the way. Finding the way out wasn’t the same. I listened for his footsteps, I tried to feel my way to gaps between long connected sections of trains. I tripped and stumbled on track and almost turned my heel. 

My power turned inside my chest, but was no help. My side wasn’t quite as quiet, the pain in my wound was loud and it wanted my attention. _The gauze_. Leaving it in there had seemed a good idea in the gas station when my ring had been working. Now, every step felt like steel wool rubbing at my insides. 

Twice I found myself turning back towards the battle. It had to have been five minutes now, surely this couldn’t last much longer. 

The cold metal of a ladder brushed against my finger. The edge of this freight card had a way to get to the roof. Slowly, regretting every rise of my left leg, I pulled myself to the top. 

In the center of the train yard, Dauntless was visible now. His Arclance was no longer scoring furrows in the sky, and his shield wasn’t visible. He flew erratically, and Purity was shepherding him, helping to stop him from rising too high. 

I could turn back, and go and meet them. I could go to the Rig or the hospital or whatever they’d make me do, and they’d call my dad, and the money would be off my hands. I could listen to what they told me, and go where they wanted me to go, and in three years or more, I’d get to stop villains, and stop them _properly_. Read them their rights, shout at them through a megaphone, and curse them out at the water cooler when their expensive lawyer got them out again.

Up here, too, it was clear that if the Merchant villain _had_ been close then he wasn’t any more. Ahead of me were only the street-lights of the Bay, and the near sections of the Dock, not so far from my home. It seemed much closer up here than it had been from the ground. 

I made my choice. With the route planned from above, I was back and squeezing under the chain-link fence in minutes. Battery could deal. Next time, I’d make a better impression. 

***** *****

Mom had come to Brockton Bay in the late 80s. Her best friend had been dating a man (and wasn’t that such a scandal, she had said), and the man was moving back home, and she was following him. New York had lost its lustre by then. Mom had tangled with the cape culture in New York and she’d been burned. When Lustrum’s second wave feminism turned violent she escaped prison time by the skin of her teeth. She’d needed a new start. 

Mom and Zoe had taken up a small flat in Bricktown—back then, Bricktown had been one of the cheaper parts of the city, underdeveloped, and in the uninteresting south of the bay, weird as that was to think now—she took up an associate’s position _ad-hoc_. She’d met my Dad years before, just as she was getting into the movement. When she found herself in his city, she’d looked him up. He must have made quite an impression, to be worth it, after several years without seeing him and having sworn off men in the time between. 

“Dad. You’re burning the eggs.” 

He came back from wherever he was with a curse, yanking the pan off the heat and stabbing the eggs viciously with a spatula. 

“We can call them half-scrambled,” I offered. He set the pan down and one large hand rubbed tiredly over his face. There was patchy stubble there, and a thin moustache. But then, he was rarely completely clean shaven these days. I’d waited for him to bring up Purity again, but he was keeping it in his pocket for now. 

“Sorry, Owl,” he said. He served up. “Did you sleep alright?” 

I did not. “Never better,” I said, with a shrug. Using the fork in my right hand pulled across my body and antagonised my wound, now swab free. In my bedroom, in the morning light, it'd been much shallower than I’d thought the night before. Still, it wasn’t comfortable, a finger-tip gouge just below my waist. I’d picked up a catalogue of bruises, too. My lower legs were covered in blue, like I’d gone a round with a one-foot high Alexandria. 

“Actually,” I said, after the customary period of awkward silence had been properly observed, “I was going to head into the Bay today, if you don’t mind.” 

He smiled; a real smile. “Yeah, that sounds great. I’ll drive us in, if you’d like. What?” 

My involuntary grimace had given me away. This was why I kept my face down. The bullies always knew when they’d landed a good one. 

“I need to buy some new stuff. Ladies stuff, Dad.” 

“What and I can’t be around for that?” he asked. 

“I’d rather you weren’t,” I said, quietly. 

“Oh,” he said. 

Washing up was silent, after we’d finished, then Dad went through to the lounge, and I went upstairs to prepare. 

My power was back at full speed. The crystalline heart turning, the pointy spurs slipping through each other in that way I felt them do. The energy was different though, I put it down to whatever had happened being not quite fixed. It was repairing itself, or building up again, or something. Still, the current could charge again. My ring was drinking as greedily as it had been before, I just couldn’t transform it, couldn’t reach that low hum that had been just below its surface the past month. 

In my bedroom, I tried again, in case the length of the meal had been the time it needed, to no success. The energy that was being generated was no longer oily and cold, coiling through me. Now it felt like a vibration, one that pushed out and built against my edges. 

The plan today was simple, go to the market, sans Dad; allowing me to limp to my heart's content. There was still a heavy, squirming feeling in my stomach, suspiciously like guilt, but at this point it was certain that the money wasn’t being handed in. Not in one piece, not when it made a better trap than evidence: Lung wasn’t Al Capone, and the IRS weren’t going to take him down. 

With the loss of my handcuffs, and didn’t my face turn sour at that… With the loss of my handcuffs, and the events of the night before, I needed to _shop_. I needed to shop _expensively_. 

In front of the small mirror in my bathroom, I brushed my hair. With my too wide mouth, unfashionable glasses and stick-thin figure, I wasn’t conventionally or even unconventionally attractive, but I liked my hair. It was rich, and thick, and more often curly than frizzy. It was easy to manage. I let it hang down. After a night in an itchy balaclava breathing my own exhaled air, it was good to feel myself again. 

Before breakfast I’d scribbled down the changes my power had undergone, and the capabilities my umbrella had displayed against gunfire, and the discovery of my ring’s power. It was important to be meticulous. The more I recorded the more I’d be able to use my power effectively. 

Point in case, I needed some jewellery, in addition to all the more disposable and useful things that I could’ve packed my utility belt with before last night’s misadventure. I had a theory, solidified by the ring, and I wanted to test it. 

My sneakers held a power that helped me cover ground quickly, and the ring that bound my finger helped to keep me in one piece. Even the umbrella’s powers made a sort of sense, if you squinted. I suspected that my items’ powers weren’t entirely random, rather they came from what I thought the item was for. It made sense. First it made them _better_ , then, when they were as good as they could be in a mundane way, it made them paranatural. 

My earliest experiments had proven that getting another ring was out, or new shoes. While it seemed to recognise two shoes as one ‘object’, when I tried to maintain a charge to two of the same type of thing, the rate of charge slowed down by much more than half. 

With a bracelet, or a necklace, I’d have another item that I could wear all the time, and the constant temptation to charge my glasses would be easier to ignore. If the new things were high quality from the beginning then it would improve more quickly than even my ring had. Most importantly, if I made the new object a charm bracelet, or a birth-stone necklace or something, would it direct the power? Would I get an item that made me lucky, or turned me into crystal like Narwhal? 

Also, I wanted a cellphone. 

When I went downstairs, Dad was still in the lounge. Retrieving my sneakers quietly and slipping them on, smooshing my heel down on the back, in order to not disturb him didn’t work. The recliner creaked as he stood and made his way over. He had his wallet out. He took out sixty dollars and held it out. 

“Here you go, Owl,” he said. 

Would it look too odd if I refused? It felt like more of a trespass to take _his_ money than the money under the basement floor. 

“That’s ok, Dad, I’ve still got some money I’ve squirreled away from Grandma.” 

“You shouldn’t be spending your allowance on things you need, even if I can’t get them for you. Take the money, Taylor.” What could I say to that? I took the money. Hopefully, I could slip it back into his wallet in a few weeks, or hide it in his boots. 

He looked at me awkwardly, I stared back, and the moment dragged on. 

“Goodbye,” I said. Neither of us moved. He was frowning now, looking very perplexed. 

“Errr. Toilet,” I said. I ran upstairs and closed the bathroom door loudly but stayed outside. How was I going to get the money? Our house wasn’t big, and from my Dad’s recliner he could see through to the kitchen. We never closed the door, so it was basically an open plan. The problem was that the door down to the basement was on the right side of the kitchen, while the door to the kitchen from the hall was on the left. 

A peak over the bannister showed he wasn’t still by the door. How to do it? A rough plan came to me quickly. 

I crossed the landing to my Dad’s bedroom. It smelled strange, like cologne or something. All I needed was something that would roll. There were some cents and a couple of silver dollar coins on his dresser. _Now you’re stealing from Dad, too?_

Creeping silently down the steps wasn’t so challenging. If you stood on the edges, where they joined the wall and the bannister they didn’t creak. The back of his head crept into view as I shimmied down in small steps. This was much too athletic for bruised legs. 

From the kitchen I winged the coin between the spindles of the handrail. Too hard. Instead of landing with a sufficiently unthreatening _flump_ , or even rolling down the stairs to convince him we were haunted, the dollar smacked into the plaster of the wall, loudly. 

Dad jerked up with a cry, none of his attention on the kitchen, and I shot to the door, opening it quickly and closing it softly, before rushing down the concrete stairs. No creaking there. 

I kicked the boxes to the side, pried open the hole, and pulled my umbrella out the way. Yesterday's unreplaced stacks were still at the top. I grabbed one and stuffed it in my pocket, then started to heave the slab back into place. 

The door to the kitchen opened, just as the stone slipped down with a bang. 

“Taylor?” 

Shit. No time for the boxes. “Here!” I called. I bounded up the stairs, my aching bruises protesting, and my side twinging. “Here! Just getting Grandpa’s umbrella!” I said. I waved it in front of his face.

“Ahuh,” he said. 

I brushed some dust off my front, and he stood back to let me through into the kitchen. “It might rain,” I said. 

“Right.” He paused. Atrophied dad instincts were telling him something, I’m sure. I’d used to be a terrible liar, too enthusiastic, my face too expressive. I breathed out, let my shoulders sink down. This was normal Taylor, living her life. 

“Right,” he said, again, “just keep it up here. The boxes down there are precarious.” 

“Ok, Dad.” I stepped through to the front door, get my coat. 

“Do you want me to drive you there?” 

“Bye, Dad,” I said. 

Outside, the Sunday morning sky was bright, a cold blue free of clouds. My steps took me east again. That was as exciting as my day would be getting today, I decided. 

A shopping trip with money to spend. A day of rest before a gloomy Monday return to school. No fights, no power problems, no villains. 

I have to learn to stop jinxing myself.

***** *****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to LokiMotion for his question. There was originally such a pointless minor change in her appearance for the sake of how she dealt with her trigger, but it would just distract, and do I really want to dedicate paragraphs to it down the line? No, believe it or not but I’m trying to follow King’s ‘cut 10%’ advice where I can manage it. Normal curly haired Taylor here.


	8. 1.S

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hope this makes sense and is readable and enjoyable. As always, all feedback and AmeriPicking welcome.

**1.S**

***** *****

The pillow was soft, the air smelled of perfume. Peyton woke up suddenly, startling up to sitting. Waking somewhere unfamiliar was normal now, but the confusion of not being home didn’t go away, that half-second panic of not recognising his surroundings.

“Good morning, Fuzzhead.” Annie’s voice was always a little raspy, like she had a sore throat, or she’d just gone too hard on the karaoke. She had a tiny lisp, too, but she pulled it off. 

“‘ey, you,” he said. “What up?” He pushed himself onto his elbows and rubbed sleep from his eyes. 

His hand felt over the stubble of his still too-short hair and he looked around. Annie was looking back, her eyes tracing over his head too, the corner of her mouth turned down. Black hair, pale skin, with brown eyes like honey in sunlight. She was dressed in a tee, and pyjama bottoms. She pulled a face at his raised eyebrow; pouting. 

“I don’t like it,” she said. “You look like a lazy skinhead.” From her half of the bed she poked his ribs with a cold toe. 

“And I’m hungry, and you owe me. Twice,” she said. She was sat up against the headboard, and she spun a handcuff around her finger. 

Peyton sat up. “Yo, thanks. I wouldn’t have come if I’d not… Shit. I don’t want you thinking I’ve got wrapped up in anything that’s–”

“Whatever you get up to at the Palanquin doesn’t matter to me, as long as you’re being safe.”

“Huh?” asked Peyton. 

Annie tossed the handcuffs onto the bedspread next to his head. They were thin, silver, linked by a thin chain. “I know kink handcuffs when I see them,” she said. 

“They’re not real?” he asked. 

“I wouldn’t have been able to get you out of them if they were,” she said. “I’m hungry.” And she poked him with her toe again. “Make me something.” 

“Well… Shit,” he said, looking at the handcuffs. They weren’t real. He rubbed at his wrists. They had felt real. “It’s not like that.” 

She grinned at him and got out of bed, fucker was teasing him. Her one bed flat connected bedroom to kitchen on one corner and to the bathroom on the other. She went into the bathroom and was back a second later carrying a garbage bag with his hair in, disappearing into her kitchen. 

He got up, pulled on his shirt, and his jeans. 

“Ay, you want I should go get breakfast?” he asked.

Her answer was immediate. “Egg McM–”

“Yeah, I got it.” Without a belt, his jeans slipped down when he stood straight. Where was his hoodie? She appeared in the doorway. 

“Ew. Have a shower. For my sake.” 

“I gotta hustle.” He shrugged; pulled on his sneakers, picked up his hoodie from the bathroom floor. “Oh, can you lend me for breakfast?” 

Annie sighed. “The Merchants didn’t pay you?” 

He shrugged. “They said it was exposure. Told me to deal.” 

“Fuckers.”

“Naw, actually deal.” He tapped his back pocket, feeling the baggy still in there. “They gave me some grass, a little bit of other shit. As long as I’m not on the street, I can move it wherever.” 

She put her head in one hand. “Peyton,” she said. 

“Shit went sideways in a big way. So, can you lend me?” he asked. Their eyes battled. She wanted to know what had happened last night, she was determined to make a cape of him. He just wanted breakfast. She went to her purse on the floor and gave him ten dollars. 

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Benny sourced me some canvas, really good quality, five sizes. I’ll head to Lords early, get there for nine. Make _bank_ today." 

“Peyton,” she said, waving a slender wrist with a bright watch at him, “it’s ten.”

“For real?” He took her chin in his hand, kissed her tightly. “I gotta’ run.” 

“Peyton,” she warned. 

“I gotta! The good spots will be going. No one buys from the edges.” He was out the door, her voice chased after him. 

“Peyton, my money!” 

“I owe you!” he called back. 

Annie’s apartment was in the Bay village, the halfway to halfway-respectable development complex that had been built in the 90s over the rills, the little streams that joined the Atlantic, north of the train yard. The corridor to her door was dark, but she was on the ground floor near the garage so it was easy to get out, and in, without a fob. 

Outside, with cold sea air blowing in off the Atlantic, Peyton headed south, keeping his eyes down. Even on a Sunday morning, it was _not_ uncomplicated when crossing Archer’s Bridge on foot. 

“I’m good, man, I’m good,” he said, to the teenager in Merchant colors. The kid’s backup didn’t take it as disrespect, from where he watched at the end of the bridge. The dealer couldn’t have been older than sixteen. Peyton shook his head. That was old to still be on weekend work. 

Through the Docks, and the Docks South, he followed the coast, as the buildings got taller, and nicer. The roads widened, the busses got shinier, and the cars less beat up. There wasn’t rubbish _everywhere_ , just on the edges of the sidewalk. Shit was like a different city in Downtown. 

He spent Annie’s money on some rolling papers, and a coffee. He took a paper, filled and sparked it, smoking quickly. He was still late. 

Lords Market came into sight just down from the bus station, it was a whole block by itself. A big sandstone building with vaulted arches all the way around its four walls, the market building tapered to a flat roof of the same pale stone, with columns supporting where the eaves projected out over the sidewalk surrounding the building. The columns were white, a little more worn from rain and wind, and he knew they crumbled and flaked onto your fingertips when touched. 

Peyton pinched out the blunt before he entered, tapping it against the skin of his hand until he could put it in a pocket. He loved this part of the Bay, and the market hall was the jewel in its crown. Neoclassical colonial exterior belying a Dutch renaissance interior, in the style of the oldest East Coast. Shit was crazy. 

He joined the throng pushing into the building. The inside was a mixture of solid and impermanent. The food hall was in the center, open to the high ceiling fifty yards above. Cold in winter, the eateries were not much used. The second ring was all small permanent stalls, three walled wooden cabins that you could hang your merch from. The outer ring was where the newer pitches set up with their own tables and stands. Artists, hobbyists, and nasal terrorists with home-grown bath bombs faced away from the center towards the solid shops; those proper professional businesses open all year round, with properties built into the walls of the market. 

The spotter’s office was in the walls too, in a corner. Fat, with a belly straining at his shirt, and a bitch-ass tie with piano keyboards all over it, he treated Peyton like crap he’d stepped in. 

“Yeah. Can’t help you kid. You’re too late. Take a walk.” He wouldn’t be moved. 

Peyton kicked the trash bin, holding his jeans up with his off hand. It was too cold and too windy to try and sell on the Boardwalk, but the dick hadn’t cared. Five faux-mystic craft jewellery stores was apparently no problem, but there was no space for him. It was definitely bullshit. 

“Come on, Peyton, I’ve got places to be.”

***** *****

Lords Market wasn’t surrounded by much, the malls and Downtown proper being further south. To the south-west was the Bay’s library, and there were restaurants further in towards Captain’s Hill and Empire territory. One face, though, looked out at the sea over Lords Street, the city’s big boulevard, though trees were sparse. Four lanes wide there was a pedestrian strip in the middle so that you could pause if you were too slow to cross in one try, and it had several bus stops on it.

He set up there. The cameras wouldn’t spot him, but he was easily visible from the main doors that shoppers used.

“Ey, yo, can you like move on? I’m trying to establish a business.” The tallest of the pre-teens girl under the shelter held out a hand. They moved on for the five dollars left over from Annie’s ten. 

Peyton had hidden his zip bag of canvases on top of a coffee shop in the week and it hadn’t disappeared. He pulled out the banner he’d prepared. ‘Painted with Powers!’ hung limply between the two too-close bus sign posts. 

It didn’t look too great, but he had to paint letters by hand. 

The police rolled by twice, pigs in shades eyeballing him but not stopping, Peyton not worth their time. He sat there for two hours. Some would look at him as they crossed the street, but no one approached to enquire or commission. No one trusted a white guy with short hair in a black hoodie. 

It was about midday. She was like fifteen, sixteen, maybe; a few years younger than him. Long black curly hair, thick glasses and a zip top, she walked with a limp. 

“Buzz off, you can’t afford me.” Peyton was hunched on the bus shelter's bench, and he rolled tobacco into a cigarette. A normal one. It’d been at least an hour. She’d been avoiding his eyes but when he spoke she looked at him and didn’t look away. Didn’t blink. 

“You’re an artist?” she asked, and she had the Brocktonite accent. 

He inclined his head towards the blank canvases stacked next to him, and raised an eyebrow. He sheltered his cigarette in a hand as he lit it, turning away for a moment. 

“They’re blank,” she said. 

“I do commissions.” 

“How much?” she asked. 

He looked at her again, she was still doing the overly strong eye-contact thing. Her jeans were generic, her jacket was thick, and almost as worn as his, and her glasses were distinctly old and cheap. Her sneakers though: her sneakers were quality. He couldn’t see a tick, or a puma, but they looked custom. Big money items. 

“Hundred,” he tried. 

“Deal.” And she had a Benjamin in her hand. His eyebrows rose despite himself. She asked him for a picture of the coast, looking from Downtown to the North, at sunset.

“Make sure it’s got the trainyard in,” she said, looking at him. 

“It’s easier if I’m doing what I can see,” Peyton muttered. She waved the bill at him, eyes still fixed on his. “Shit, fine.” His hand touched the canvas, it glowed black, purple, blue, and a small splash of yellow. It pulled back into a view of the Bay with the ferry port in the middle, sticking out onto the sea. It wasn’t bad. Better than usual, actually. 

The girl nodded her head appreciatively. “That’s great. That’s actually really good. Does it keep glowing?”

He smiled. His wasn’t the sort of power hardly no-one gave a shit about. “Naw, it stops. Quicker if I try.” He made it settle, then with a marker signed _Sketch_ in the bottom corner. 

“What happened to your face, did you fall over?” she asked. 

Pushing the canvas at her, he took the money. 

“Are you here all day?” 

He met her gaze, and she didn’t blink. Creepy kid, man. Peyton found he didn’t want to answer her. He shrugged. “Depends.” 

“Well do you always set up here?” 

Peyton made an ‘up yours’ at the market hall. “Nah man, I get spots in Lords when their manager’s not menstruating.” 

Her lip turned up at his language. “Sorry,” he said. 

“My dad and me just moved here, we want some wall hangings, like four or five, and he’s a big cape fan. I know he’d love more like this, on bigger canvases, but he can’t swing by until the evening. He’d pay.”

 _I’m not a cape_ , died on his tongue. That was a lot of money. “I’ll be here till five,” he said, after a few moments. 

“Perfect,” she said, “he’ll be here this afternoon.” She rearranged her bags to take the canvas and headed back towards the market. He watched her till she disappeared back in.

“Asswipe,” he said, to the air. Who wanted the shitty north end of the Bay in a portrait, and the train yard.

The deli place down the street didn’t have change for a hundred, till he bought enough for two. 

“Here, man.” 

“It’s my arthritis, it got my hands.” 

“Sure, man. I got you a drink, too.” 

Then it was back to the hustle. He got one more sale. An older lady who gave him twenty for an 8” by 8” that he hadn’t even realised he had. She asked for her grand-daughter, he gave her a nice portrait of the Rig. His power didn’t really do people. Their faces and their hands didn’t work. 

It passed four. Passed five, too. At quarter to six, by the big clock on Lords Market’s east side, he packed up. She wasn’t coming back. Worse, it was dark. The sun had set hours ago, and he was starting to feel uneasy. What had that kid been doing with hundreds? Nice trainers didn’t seem like a strong explanation now, hours later. There was a feeling, a prickling where the wind hit the back of his neck. 

Peyton shivered, he could feel the cold on his scalp. The Palanquin was gloomy on a Sunday night, even free. Benny hadn’t been too friendly to him last time he had crashed. Jesse had his own shit going on, baby mama drama and kids. He got his phone out, he had her money now, and two nights wasn’t moving in. 

_Ane, gt ur mne. Cn I cm ovr? P._

The phone swooshed, the message sent. He headed North. The wind from the sea tried to turn him back Downtown, pushing against him. He’d wrapped all his canvases tightly in the zip-bag, and he put them back for next Sunday. The alley entrance with the fire escape to the roof, where he’d stored them this week, was just on his left. 

It wasn’t inviting in the dark, maybe he’d just hold onto them today, put them on the roof in the daytime tomorrow. There was a movement, out the corner of his eye. He looked behind him. There was no one there. Some cars passing down the boulevard. A bus at the station. No one walking. Fuck, he was jumpy. 

The street peeled off Lords towards the bridge, and the headland that formed the Bay. The streets grew narrow, the street-lights more sparse. The prickling on his neck didn’t go away. Fuck. Had there been someone look at him from the corner of that clapboard apartment building? He could have sworn someone had just stepped around it. 

Peyton sped up, walking through the Docks quickly, keeping his head down. He checked his phone, no response. 

“Ah, shit, man.” He sped up again, turned left onto Broad Street like he was heading to the Hill of Fort Beagle. He shot glances over his shoulder. There was no one there, just an idling taxi. Quickly, he jogged right, then right again. As soon as he set foot on Archer’s Street again he sprinted towards the bridge. He kept the canvas bag tight to his body, and one hand on his belt. 

There were no footmen on the roads, just some idling Merchant cars parked on the kerb. He ran past them, over the bridge, back towards the rills. 

When he reached Annie’s apartment block in the Bay Village, he was gasping. His side was stitching. There was no one behind him. He’d run for nothing. Peyton wiped his head on his hoodie sleeve. He was clowning. He laughed. Spooked at his own shadow. Seeing Dauntless light up, being close to the cannon when the real capes had been fighting, it had shook him more than he’d realised. Peyton ducked into the garage and then jimmied open the faulty door into the apartment building. 

Annie’s corridor was brighter than the outside now, if only just. Inside, on familiar ground, he settled. He’d been spooked, had invented some danger cus he was scared of the dark, but it was done now. Safe and sound, back at Annie’s. 

The door was open, that was strange, he approached slowly, nudged it wide with his foot. 

“Hey Annie? Did you get my message?”

Annie wasn’t there. Skidmark was. 

He stood by her dresser, holding the phone that he’d obviously just picked it up. “Hey cocksucker,” he said.

Meth-head teeth, with sunken eyes, and black skin, tight over his skull; a blue mask covered the top half of his face, like he was Zorro. “Yeah I got it. After you FUCKED me last night, figured I ought to send you a message of my own.”

Skidmark put down Annie’s phone and pulled out a gun.

***** *****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Interludes, am I right? I'm hoping to use them to introduce important plot events or important characters, preferably both. I think interludes are often not well received, so I'll always try and keep them shorter than a regular chapter. This guy's an important new character, for the story, but he's also an OC of one of the Bay's forgotten parahumans that we hear about in the early canon adventure and then they all hand-wave leave after Leviathan's attack when WB decided the BB cast list was already pretty big. Anyway, yeah. Would be good to know if he feels real, is likeable? Is not terribad?


	9. 1.A

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was really challenging to write. It’s an Alabaster perspective, so if you don’t want to read a Neo-nazi perspective there's an end note with a two sentence TL;DR. 
> 
> Tried to avoid copious slurs, though there’s one or two in here. Tried to avoid overtly horrendous ideas though there’s one or two in here. Tried to walk the line. Please let me know if I didn’t succeed. Open to fixing it. 
> 
> Goes without saying, but: As a mixed-race Britbong chap, none of the American neo-nazi opinions in this reflect my own.

**1.A**

***** *****

Kaiser said the world belonged to the white man, and that the white man need only act in a manner consistent with that fact, to make the world as it ought to be. Axiomatic. Evident. It was a truth that couldn’t be sullied, much like Alabaster himself. His body reset, the shock of nervousness thrilling through him before the stream of his consciousness could calm it. Again.

Twenty minutes north of Brockton Bay, just before Odiorne point, the Ruby Dream Casino sat on the peak of High Rock. The view from the parking lot was impressive. Even only a short way out of the city the ocean regained its majesty, unfettered by rusting hulks, brutal industrial architecture, and an oil rig that lit up like a 10 dollar Christmas light. Alabaster took a deep breath, listened to the crashing of the waves on the rocks sixty feet below, his eyes locked on the horizon. 

This was the new world, the new world as his ancestors had found it. Ripe, full of promise, and destiny. Before parahumans, before endbringers, endless immigration, and their descendants’ idolatry of unnatural practices and order. 

“Boss, we’re ready,” said Fischer. Fischer was the liaison between himself and his cell, a solid, dependable man. 

There were twenty of them, in five cars. Just in case. He singled out four other men, men he knew. “With me,” he said. “The rest of you stay here. Fischer, keep them alert.” 

The parking lot was mostly empty, so early in the morning. The sun was only just up. Not that it mattered, the Ruby Dream was open all hours, and there were always some of those he needed here. 

It was common knowledge that the Ruby Dream was an ABB casino, and, like a lot of common knowledge, it wasn’t completely true. The Ruby Dream was owned by a national casino chain, based in Las Vegas, and mismanaged by a Frederick Winger. Set outside city limits to avoid local taxes, it had built a relationship facilitating the gambling that the Japs liked: smoky room stuff, where you were more likely to see kooky-dominoes than dice. It was far enough from the Bay that they felt secure to gather in number, in a way they wouldn’t dare in the city’s legal casinos, outside of Tokyotown. 

That distance would help him today. Lung would be in the city. Oni Lee would be watched for, and Alabaster warned before he arrived. Of all of the Empire, Alabaster had the least to fear from Lee. 

The casino was plain. A modern construction, without character. Presumably designed by a gay in San Francisco, fabricated in Mexico, and staffed by immigrants. Alabaster paused a second. Here to treat with the ABB he was likely going to be served by Kyushu’s other cockroaches, too, installed by the gang to make it more homey. He hated it when they handled his drinks, or food. 

Automatic doors opened wide for him and the boys. He hadn’t told them how to dress and they wore the usual mix of leathers, fatigues and tactical wear. Alabaster wore a charcoal grey suit. A two button jacket, over a silk shirt, and a tie of a lighter grey. The flawless, pale, hairlessness of his skin and face was highlighted. It was the sort of dressing-well they were bound to take as insulting. The reset happened as he stepped through, but he gathered himself immediately, buttoning his suit jacket. 

The inside of the casino was much more typical. Dated carpets with garish patterns were designed to draw the eye away from spills, and machines that continually hollered and flashed fenced off narrow paths, all of it trapped inside a floor without windows that looked exactly the same at midday and midnight. 

The casino proper was barred from the atrium by a perspex divider, with a turnstile. A young blonde woman on the reception started, her wide eyes meeting his perfectly white ones, without pupil or iris. He winked. It was important that he ignore the big bouncer standing by the turnstile, he had watched Kaiser and his under-study Victor enough to know the importance of projecting confidence. He reset. 

He pulled a gold card from his inside pocket, and tapped it against the sensor of the turnstile, its light turning from red to green. Obtained from a sister casino a few states over, he held a hand up to his men. 

“Keep everyone happy, no one causes trouble. No one comes in.” 

The metal detector he stepped through buzzed aggressively. He heard the thump of flesh hitting flesh but didn’t look back. 

The green path set into the carpet’s design curved towards a long bar. A bronze bannister ran along its front, and a dozen stools were bolted onto the wooden floor immediately beside it. There were only a couple of bar-flies still drinking, a black man and a white man at opposite ends. Alabaster walked to the bar, stepped between the stools and leaned on the bar. He coughed. The black looked at him, dark eyes meeting his white. He had the sense to get up and leave. 

A napkin wiped that stool clean, but he sat one over anyway. The barman didn’t step any closer, preferring to take his order from 6 feet away. His hair was curly, he wore thick glasses; the thrill of working near money had clearly pulled him from the city. 

“Whatever’s domestic,” said Alabaster. 

He drank, played with the label on the bottle. He thought the scum would make a power play, keep him waiting. He reset, nervousness running through him for that half second as always. It would be an unknowingly effective strategy from them, irritatingly. Luck rewarding blind guessing. Introspection and stillness were not successful occupations for him. 

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,” he muttered to himself. 

He had read Nietzsche, Baeumler, and Bergman, of course. He understood the striving of the _übermensch_. All Kaiser’s suggestions to deepen his understanding of the movement. He reset, began fidgeting on the stool. It was hard, hard to commit to the process, not the dream. But he was willing, he could bear it. He wasn’t Hookwolf. He wasn’t lip-service, savagery, and too much baggage.

The swearing started when the young gangster caught sight of him and carried on until he was a fingertip away from Alabaster’s face. 

“You fucked up. You’re going to be fucked up. We’re going to fuck you up. You killed us, we’re going to kill all of you. You’re going to regret coming here, you’re going to fucking die. You ready to die?” 

He was tall, pretty heavy set for a chinese or whatever he was. He wasn’t even twenty, too. A sacrificial lamb by someone a little more senior. The anger proved it, the continuing hateful rant, delivered so close to Alabaster’s face that the ganger’s night of drink and smoking could be smelt on his breath. They were testing him. Alabaster reset, there was the half second of nervousness. His hand twitched, and he turned it into a smooth grab for the laminated drink menu on the bar. 

The white guy at the far end of the bar cleared out, and some of the tables in the distance were thinning, too. The cockerel, puffed up, continued to cluck, and the barman shrunk against the back of the bar. 

“Get me a white russian, too,” said Alabaster, “for this kid’s daddy.” He turned to face the young man. “Go and get him.” 

“Yeah, I’ll get him, and then we’re going to fucking kill you.” 

The white russian was placed next him, and Alabaster replaced it next to the stool two over from him, pointedly. 

When the young man came back he was with a smaller man, weedy, with greasy hair and a lined face. He could have been thirty or fifty, in that way they did, and he had a small black moustache, and long hair to his shoulders. The ABB’s man sat at the stool, and picked up the glass, drank, kept drinking, until it was gone. White milk all over his upper lip. Disgusting. 

“What do you want?”

That was the multi-million dollar question. The Empire wouldn’t turn on their own on the say-so of the ‘Asian Bad Boys’, and Lung would know that. He wouldn’t have sent a messenger if he didn’t have strong evidence, and he wouldn’t have revealed a new parahuman unless he wanted to show he was ready for war. If it was a lie, then it was a subtler attack than Lung had ever seemed capable of before. If it was a lie, then Lung had his money back, but not the men that had died. It would mean that wherever the money had been going was binding his hands, stopping him from reacting the way he usually did to Empire attacks. 

“What do you want?” replied Alabaster. 

The ganger looked at the barman, tapping two fingers onto the surface of the bar and was rewarded with a beer. 

“I am a simple man, Alabaster, not much ambition,” he said, “I want beer, money, drugs, a safe house. I want 8 soldiers back to life. I want you dead.” 

Alabaster smashed one heavy, white fist down on the bar, hard enough that the bar broke along with his hand, before resetting. The ABB man didn’t jump, swiped up the bottle before it wobbled over, took a swig and looked at him. 

The ganger didn’t mention Lung, didn’t need to. Who else could squat on the Docks like a hemorrhoid and inspire other smaller hemorrhoids into thinking that they existed for anything more than their poor choice of real-estate. It was no use letting him get under his skin. He wasn’t here to murder, and the ABB couldn’t do more than insult him. 

“You killed our men, you stole from the dragon. Now you’re nervous ‘cus it’s been days. And your metal man has let his least important hound off its leash, to sniff around. So sniff, dog.” 

_The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly_. There was no need to take a deep breath. The anger was lost in a surge of nervousness, half a second after the little man finished talking. The Empire wasn’t a gang like the ABB, no matter what the news reported. The Empire was a movement, a cause, that happened to be illegal. For every Hookwolf, there were three Alabasters, people who wanted to make the world better and proper.

Being oblique wasn’t working, better to take another approach. One from a position of strength. 

“The Empire cannot allow–”

The little man held his fingers up, cutting him off. He pulled a cheap phone from his pocket and typed in a number.

“The Empire–” a jab of the finger interrupted him again. He spoke rapidly in gobbledegook into the phone, then put it on speakerphone. A gravelly voice replied in the same language. 

“The dragon says talk slowly, so that I can translate.” 

Alabaster grit his teeth. But he did as requested. He was representing the Empire. 

Hookwolf was strong, but Hookwolf didn’t believe. Power and money for their own sake were enough for Hookwolf and it was believable that Brad would steal the money and report the attack unsuccessful, if he thought he could get away with it. But he could hardly come out and ask Lung directly, couldn’t be led by the nose by him.

“The Empire cannot allow the ABB to impress a white girl into its service.” 

The ganger translated, Lung replied in kind. He spoke at length, for several minutes. 

“He says ‘Fuck you. I will get my money back.’” 

“That’s it?” asked Alabaster. “It sounded like more.” 

Lung’s man took a swig of his beer. “That’s the message.” 

“Well then, Kaiser’s message is that the Empire has tolerated the ABB too long,” and it was true. They had. 

The ABB held a poor and non-white district of the Bay. A gang entirely based around profit and crime, without an ideology or anything to _build_ on, they didn’t understand that the Empire’s focus was more often turned to furthering the cause of a white America than gang borders. “Your ploy hasn’t worked, you have extorted white capes, and you have slandered the Empire. If you cannot tolerate being constrained to the Docks then the Empire will have to act.” 

Lung’s rock-salt voice came back through the cell, speaking slowly. “Lung says, ‘You Empire fuck stole my money, you show up at my casino to threaten me. You must be very nervous.’” 

This was unproductive. “This was a reply in kind, nothing more.” 

It was dutifully translated. “A reply to what?” 

Nervousness shot through him involuntarily, nothing to do with the conversation. “Your notice on Hookwolf, your new cape’s message, about the money.” It was perhaps time for directness. “Did you send her, or is someone making a fool of you?” 

There was a pause, then Lung spoke, before the ganger could finish translating. “I don’t need new capes,” he growled in accented English, “I won’t talk to the Empire. I will get my money back and kill two for every one you took, stay where you are. I will come and show you.”

***** *****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alabaster goes to return a message to the ABB, like their new cape delivered the other day, concerned that Hookwolf may have betrayed the Empire. He finds out that the ABB doesn’t have a new cape. The ABB finds out a new cape was pretending to be affiliated with them


	10. Overshadow - 2.1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Yeah, so you can see why I didn’t want that last interlude to go out as a single update. This chapter owes a great deal to Juff, Joe, and Kerbal Program, thanks to their looking over and finding its many, many errors.
> 
> Hope it’s a good read.

**2.1**

***** *****

Dad was asleep. I could see him in his chair, snoring while the tv flickered at him. Perfect.

The back door, painted a fading white that flaked off when looked at wrong, opened quietly. The kitchen was as before. I put a couple of my bags under my kitchen chair, then headed down to the basement.

Whether Dad had believed me this morning or not, it didn’t look like he’d come down. The boxes were still where I’d left them, and the dust on the floor – treacherously clear over the loose basement slab – didn’t seem disturbed.

The things I’d bought that I couldn’t afford or explain went into the little space remaining above the duffle bag: my new cell phones, a big pack of zipties (in case today didn’t work out), first aid kits, stuff like that. The costume got plucked out to make space and then stuffed into one of the now empty retail bags. 

Quietly, slowly, I pushed the slab back into place, then the boxes back to where they were supposed to be. The bags I hadn’t left upstairs got stuffed behind a workbench that hadn’t been used in a decade. One more trip up the stairs and onto the porch got the canvas that the villain had painted me, and that went downstairs too, hidden behind my grandpa’s boxes. 

Sneaking back outside, I closed the door as quietly as I could. Mission accomplished. Now I only had my market bag with my costume stuffed in to carry back. The current hummed throughout me, pouring into my ring, my sneakers, my umbrella, my new necklace. It was going to be exhausting walking back downtown with four items charging. Better not to try and do the costume as well, not till I had to put it on. 

It didn’t take altogether long, heading back. _He_ was still there, and it couldn’t be far past three in the afternoon. 

There were some cafes with outdoor seating on the coast facing side of the market and I sat on a cold, unsteady chair at the emptiest cafe till I couldn’t feel my butt. Even despite the costs of the morning I still had the majority of the ten thousand I’d taken (and wasn’t that insane, before last week it was more money than I’d ever held in my life). It kept me supplied with coffee. When it got dark I bought myself one of their fancy subs made from organic something filled with superfood something-else, and seeds that took twice as long to pick from my teeth as the rest did to eat. The waitresses looked at me funny, but they didn’t close till six, so they were stuck with me. 

Well after sunset, he gave up. I limped up, letting him keep far enough away that it was almost a struggle to pick him out. The stress of it, the worry of losing sight of him plucked at me constantly, warring with the knot of anxiety that he would turn and spot me. He seemed as skittish as me. I saw him peer into an alleyway just beyond the square, lingering. He didn’t go in, thank God. I wasn’t going to follow him into anywhere dangerous. 

The plan was to scout out where he lived. Chance had made me stumble into him, when I’d given up on seeing my handcuffs ever again. I couldn’t leave it to chance twice. They had a month of charge. 

My body didn’t agree. My legs were stiff now, and my gait made it look like movement was a second language. Worse, my side was throbbing. It had been getting worse all day. I didn’t know if it was the aggravation of moving it around, or carrying all my shopping home rather than just spending change on a taxi. When I’d gone to the bathroom at the cafe I’d looked at it. The edges were red and angry. Little scarlet trails tracked through deep bruising all around my hip. 

The corner of a residential block let me rest for a second out of sight. I could see he was keeping the coast road. He walked on the side closest to the bay, the side that the street to Archer’s Bridge came off, heading out to the north-east and Maine. I could catch up to him. Just not on foot. Fuck. 

What could I do? I needed a bike, or a skateboard or something. Except if my sneakers had been working it wouldn’t be an issue. I reached for them, tried to get them to do their thing. Nothing. He was getting further away. 

On the main street a taxi came the opposite way, heading back towards the square. I flapped my bag at it desperately. It didn’t look like it had seen me, until it spun across the whole boulevard to turn left again, cutting across traffic, horns calling out. 

I limped toward where he jumped up on the curb, boutique bag slapping against my side with each step, the corded handles irritating the skin of my hand. I had money now. And a phone, waiting to be charged at home. I was never walking anywhere again. The door to the back seats closed with a soft clunk, and the not-exactly luxurious sticky leather didn’t matter a bit. Sitting again was heaven. 

“Where to?” 

“I’ll direct you. Head up Lords Street to the junction with the road to Archer’s street.” 

The taxi driver shrugged. He was a white guy with short hair, which was a little ominous. Still, heading through the docks towards the north end of the city where the Empire didn’t have much of a foothold made it a bit better. If the villain was heading into Merchant territory then it made it less likely that the driver was going to get in my way. We set out, the soft sound of tires rolling over blacktop, before he turned up the radio. Old person rock. Great. 

I caught sight of him just after the turn off. He looked nervous. Shifty. He kept looking over his shoulder before he turned onto a road into the city very stiffly. 

“Just hold here for a second,” I said. 

He did, but grunted. “He your boyfriend? I don’t want to get involved in anything.” 

“He’s my brother,” I lied. “He ran away.”

Taxi driver grunted again, but said nothing. We watched my ‘brother’ slouch further up the road and turn right. Without my saying anything, he rolled forward to the next turn off and pulled up to the curb. We waited. The villain appeared again, turning back towards us. He was still looking behind himself regularly, not in front, and he didn’t notice us. I ducked low on the backseat anyway. 

When he reached the avenue again he started running down Archer’s Street as fast as he could, straight along. With minimal direction, the taxi driver let him run till we saw him crest the bridge and then we set off after him. I was getting the impression this driver had been a PI in a previous life. 

The villain was caught. The Bay Village was barely in the city, north of the docks, a collection of bulk built prefab apartment blocks. I saw him clearly; he went to the first complex, four stories high, and ducked into its parking garage. Light spilled out from a door and he ducked inside. It was silent, and I waited. The taxi driver shuffled in his chair, the material of it creaking. From where we were, the difference between the square apartment windows and the rectangular windows of the stairwell was clear. I didn’t see him. If he lived upstairs then he hadn’t used stairs. I tapped my chin. 

“You found him. You want to go somewhere else?”

I pulled out forty bucks, and gave them to the driver. It was a good twenty dollars more than the fare, even with our crawling. I took out one of the loose hundreds I’d taken out the stack earlier. 

“I’m going to go see if I can knock on his door.” I showed him the bill. “Wait here for me, I won’t be long.” 

He grumbled, told me he’d make a hundred bucks in an hour if he took more fares rather than wait for me, but I didn’t buy it, and he’d already turned the engine off when I’d asked him to wait. 

Bag close to me, I ran across the road, into the garage and to the door on the left wall. It was a little stuck out, the lock didn’t fit the door well, and with a little muscle it looked like you just had to lift it a little to pull it open. I had less than a little muscle. 

“Fuck,” I said, for the second time this evening. Why couldn’t things just be easy? I just wanted my property back. Was that too fucking much to ask? 

There weren’t any other doors, and I could hardly go around the apartment windows and jump into an occupied flat. 

The untransformed umbrella tip got jammed under the door, as hard as I could. Gingerly, I put my weight on the handle, more, then more. I ended up standing on it and hopping. With a crunch, the door popped open. 

It opened into a lobby area. The floor was a stained plain plastic, and the walls a fading pale blue with metal mail slots lining one side. There was a door to the stairwell set into the opposite corner and, on the wall immediately perpendicular to it, the door to the apartments. 

Pressing my face to the thin strip of glass of the door, I saw a corridor, dark except for one open door where bright light spilled out. It closed. He’d been carrying a lot, enough that maybe he couldn’t open it and close it with his hands full. I gave myself better than fifty fifty that was him. 

I ducked into the stairwell, and found myself in luck. The stairs headed up in zig zagging flights, but they weren’t solid to the ground; underneath them there was a gap. I hid, and put on my costume over the top of my clothes. It made the bottoms irritating but it was worth it if I had to change quickly again. I slipped my sneakers back on, and pushed the empty boutique bag under the small gap beneath the first step. 

An attempt to call up my powers again did nothing, the items staying as they were. Irritating. The charge to my new gnostic necklace cut easily though, perking me up, and I cut it to my sneakers, too. I felt positively preppy. With an effort I cut the current to the ring. It had been a long time since I’d let it build up with nowhere to go, when not being shot at. 

I felt like a hunter. I felt powerful. Putting on the costume, having the drop on him, prowling down his corridor. Even without my powers being fully operational. Was the energy messing with my head? Or was it more that I’d got him, that he had nowhere to hide. It was heady. 

He wouldn’t put up a fight, not if last night was any indication. Knowing where he lived, I’d have leverage, and he’d have to give me back the handcuffs. I could get him to spill the beans on the Merchants too, get him to tell me more about their street level operations, figure out more how an independent hero could really hurt them. 

Deep breaths, Taylor. 

_What do I call myself if he asks_? Overshadow; it had been an early rejection, and I wouldn’t need it again. 

Padding the corridor to the door that had been open, I crept closer. Reached the door. There was the thud of something heavy falling. I put my ear to the thin wood.

On the other side there were voices, male voices. One of them was talking a lot, sentences and sentences, then another would talk. Shout. But shortly. It happened twice, and then the second voice was cut off by a thud. A cry of pain. A third voice, deeper still, saying something. 

Something wasn’t right here. Something wasn’t right at all. Whatever he was doing in there, it wasn’t good. He hadn’t struck me as violent, not in the way that I’d seen every other parahuman be this week, barring New Wave. There was definitely something violent happening. If he was abusing someone I had to stop him but there was no way I could barge in if someone else’s life was at stake. 

I padded back to the garage. Head halfway out the door, the taxi was still plainly in view. The lenses in my goggles were good enough that I could see the seat where the driver should have been sitting. Fuck, the fourth. Where the hell had he gone? It worked for me right now though, and I sprint-limped out of the garage and round the corner. The windows here would look into the apartments on the right side of the corridor. I counted off the first eight, until I reached the ninth. The curtains were shut, but the bathroom window was open. Higher up, small and square, and only a fingertip gap, but I could hear them now. 

“ ...understand? Tinkering isn’t cheap. Holding…” I missed the next bit. Holding something, drugs, guns? Holding out? Probably the last one because I heard the smack of something hard hitting something soft.

“I told you, man. Quicker glows brighter. You hired me to paint shit, not to fucking hide a–” 

The smack again. Someone cried out. For a minute no one said anything, then his slow voice spoke up again. “Annie,” he said, “just let her go and I’ll work it off, I’ll pay you back.” 

“You’re fucking right you will, but you’re in no position to negotiate with me. You almost got me fucked by the long dick of the law. I reckon she might need to work for me–”

“Skidmark–” 

There was a hit. Then another, then another, and the crashing of a body hitting the floor. _Skidmark_. Fuck, the fifth. Why did this keep happening? 

I made my way back from the window. The situation had completely turned on me, and … fuck. Fuck! I was going to have to save him. I was going to have to stop Skidmark. My cell phone was at home, uncharged, and useless. It had only been four days and I was already exhausted with finding myself surprised by gang crap. 

The taxi driver still wasn’t in his cab, and I ducked into the building through the door I’d busted. I needed to get them out of that room, and I needed to get the cops here, and the heroes. Preferably without them seeing me. They’d asked me to stick around yesterday, and I hadn’t. Being in the vicinity of the Merchant’s capes two nights in a row wasn’t a good look for me. If things calmed down, maybe I could just swing by once my powers were working again. Try and make deliberate contact with the heroes, smooth things out with them. The Protectorate, not the Wards.

I hobbled up two steps before I heard voices coming down from above and spun back. I limped under the stairs and dropped down. I tucked my canvas bag in a little more as their footsteps passed over my head. 

Ok, go time. Up the stairs to the next floor, the corridor to the apartments was empty and as dark as the hallway below. Next to the door was a fire alarm. I smashed the glass, and the ringing bells flared to life, deafeningly loud. As fast as my over-bruised legs could carry me, I ran to the far end of the corridor, beyond the apartment I wanted, and beyond the doors to the last flats. 

Doors started opening, and I pressed myself into the corner. The hope was that they’d all be in such a panic to leave that they’d not bother to look towards a dead end, and I was right. There were nine apartments on each side, and maybe two-thirds of them opened. Residents in various states of dress hurried to the stairwell, except for one guy on crutches who dinged on the elevator set into the recess next to the door to the stairs. As he waited he turned, and he saw me. 

“Cape!” he said. 

Stragglers turned to look at me, but the apartment I needed had already opened and the people who lived there had exited into the hallway. The family of stragglers, the last left on the floor alongside crutches man, turned to look at me, but I was already limping past them, ducking into their home. It was nice, in a cosy way. Cared for. I felt bad. 

“Sorry,” I said. I slammed the door in their face and drew the chain across and the deadbolts. It wasn’t a nice neighbourhood, and the fact flats needed more than a key to stay secure worked to my advantage. The inside was a den that attached to a bedroom on one side and a bathroom on the other. Except the bathroom was on the opposite side to the flat immediately below us, so things weren’t as identical as I’d like. I hoped they had insurance. 

I checked the bedroom first, to see if there was an en suite. The whole flat was pastel colors, and there was a crib in the corner. God damn it. I really hoped they had insurance. 

In the kitchen that attached to the den, I plugged the sinkhole and turned the faucet on to full strength, water rushing out. In the bathroom, they had another sink and a combination shower and bath. That was annoying; a bath would take minutes to fill, probably. I wasn’t sure that the guy getting beat had minutes, not if Skidmark didn’t believe it was a real fire alarm. 

Knocks sounded out, someone, the owner probably, pounding on the door. Brave. I would’ve called the PRT and backed out if an unknown parahuman had broken into my house. I plugged the bath and set the water as quickly as I could, watching it start to fill. The sink, too. 

What now? 

They had a wall phone, hanging off the column that hinted at division between their den and their kitchen. I picked it up, dialed. 

“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?” 

“Err, Police and PRT, please. And Ambulance.”

“Address?” 

I gave it and she repeated it back to me quickly, before she spoke again. 

“The Fire Service and the BBPD are already on route to your address. Is the patient breathing?” 

“Yes. He’s being attacked by Skidmark, the villain, who’s in the building. He’s on the bottom floor.”

“Are there any other villains on the premises?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“Are there any other persons in danger, ma’am?”

“I don’t know.” 

“The Police and the PRT are on their way. I need to ask you some additional questions.” 

That was all I needed to hear. “I’m sorry, I can’t. Just get here.” I hung up, checked on the sinks. The kitchen was spilling onto the floor, the water had almost reached my feet. In the bathroom the sink was overflowing, and the bathtub was three-quarters full. That was quicker than I’d thought. Perfect. 

I went to the door. The pounding was coming in fits and starts. 

“You need to get out,” I called through the door. “There are villains in the building and the PRT and Police are on their way.” 

It went quiet for a second. Holiest of holies, I heard footsteps, heading away. Someone had finally listened to me. I went to unbolt the door before I heard footsteps coming back, at speed. They slammed into the door and I flinched back, despite myself. It held, thankfully; the bolts were substantial, and the chain too. But I wasn’t getting out that way. 

I went back to the bedroom. There was a larger window on the back wall and turning the handle all the way up let it swing out like a door. I looked down. Maybe fifteen feet … ish. It felt a lot higher from this end. Water was beginning to creep into the bedroom. I looked around again; there were photos of the couple in Vegas, or maybe actual Paris, though probably not in this neighbourhood. This was bad, what I was doing, but there was possibly a man’s life on the line, even if he was a villain. Still, I could offset it a little. I pulled out the stack I had in the pocket underneath my costume and threw most of it onto their dresser. It wouldn’t help the heartbreak.

Climbing over the window-edge was an experience. The umbrella went over first, then I let myself hang from my fingertips, the movement pulling at my bullet wound. Once I was stretching down as far as I could, I dropped. It felt a lot longer than a second, my stomach swooping before I hit the narrow strip of grass bordering the building and crumpled. Nothing broke, except my dignity, and I was exactly where I needed to be. 

There was no noise from the other side of the ground floor bathroom window. Either Skidmark was there and had stopped hitting his former underling, or he’d resolved the problem permanently. The fire alarm was still ringing. I waited there for minutes. There were sirens in the distance, but it felt like they weren’t getting any closer. 

When it happened, it happened. 

“The fuck is this?!” I heard the guy from before shout, Skidmark, I presumed. Then there was a crack and a crunch, and I heard a loud smack as water came down. Curses and yelling, their swearing heading out the flat by the change in the acoustics. 

“Somebody did this, the water, the fire. This is some dickbag fucking with us. Andre, you…” I didn’t catch the rest. Didn’t care. They wouldn’t find anyone upstairs. This was my chance. 

My umbrella tip levered open the bathroom window. It was a small square thing, just above my head. I rested the umbrella on it, then tried to pull myself up. It was hard work, really hard work. A lot harder than carrying the duffle bag had been. Was I already getting used to the adrenaline of being a few yards away from supervillains? The cannon of last night came back to me, booming as it fired a shot, the terror of seeing Dauntless gone mad, and the sort of firepower that real heroes and villains could bring to bear. No, that definitely wasn’t it. With my toes scrabbling against the crevices in the brickwork, I pushed myself up and into the window, then stepped down onto the closed toilet inside, less quietly than I’d like. It clanked. 

“Hello?” someone blubbed, quiet, hard to hear. The word was thick, abnormal. It sounded like me, the time Sophia had helped me down the stairs at school and my lip had been busted. I risked popping my head out. 

The artist was under a few small fragments of roof, on a soaked bed. Water was dripping from the small hole in the ceiling, mixing with the dust on the floor. He was alone. They’d all left. 

I limped over to him. He looked bad. His face was battered, one eye was half shut, and there was blood in his hair, on his clothes, everywhere. Lumps were starting to appear over one side of his face. One of his fingers didn’t look right, in outline, and was purplish-blue. 

“Come on,” I whispered. I touched him on the arm gently, and he met my eyes. My mask lenses, at least. It explained the flinch as he recognised me. “I’m getting you out of here,” I said. 

He looked at the door. “They’re right outside,” he said, thickly. 

I nodded. “We’ll go through the window, okay?” 

He nodded, but when he went to stand, he groaned and fell back on the bed. “I don’t know if I can,” he said. 

I wasn’t having it. I pulled him up. It was weirdly similar to the night before, except this time I was willing to hold him up. Rather than the bathroom window I went to the bedroom window on the other side of the waterfall. With minimal pushing and a pretty soundless crouch-fall from him, we got him through. 

“Come on, now you,” he whispered, looking up at me from where he’d spilled onto the floor. 

“Get away from here. I’ll catch up.” He was safe now. Safer. I hadn’t forgotten why I’d come. I left the window and searched the flat. I checked the kitchen, looked through the drawers. There was nothing obvious in the bedroom. Nothing on the floor, or on the dresser. Nothing on the shelf in the bathroom. Where the hell were my handcuffs? 

“...not going to get past my skidmarks, and they won’t try till the PRT get here. Those fucks are always too slow. Let’s just grab him and–” 

He was so loud I could hear him from the moment he came back into the hallway. Fuck. I hadn’t found them. I left the bathroom, dived for the window as his voice got close. The window had swung shut. Fuck, number … whatever. I threw it open, dived through, no time to throw my umbrella through. It stabbed into my side as I landed. 

“–the fuck was that?” 

Shit. Run. Crap. Crap. Run. 

I wasn’t even aware of my legs anymore. I met the beat-up guy; he’d just made it to the corner of the building. I snatched him by the arm, looking back over my shoulder. Skidmark’s upper body was halfway out the window. I’d never seen him before, not on the wiki, not on the news. He was black, thin. He had a mask over the top of his head that covered everything but his eyes. It was the eyes that stayed with me. Bloodshot, too big for his head, brown. His eyes fixed on me like knives. I’d never seen it before, never seen the stare a person gives when they decide to murder you.

Then I was around the corner. 

I had my arm under the–

“What’s your name?” I asked. He didn’t hesitate to answer. 

“Peyton,” he said. I hadn’t expected _that_ name, not his real name. Even without his plain domino mask on. 

“Come on, Peyton.” 

Everyone had gathered on the street directly in front of the apartment complex. There were maybe eighty or ninety people huddled together in little groups, keeping their space from each other. Even living on top of each other, this probably wasn’t the sort of place where you got to know your neighbours well. 

In the distance I could see a fire truck, a couple of hundred yards down the road. Between them and the crowd on the street there were Merchants. Several cars had formed a barrier across it, blocking off the road, but it wasn’t the real wall. Just beyond them there was a bright multicolored strip that completely bisected the street and the ground on either side of it. Skidmark’s power. He could put barriers on a surface that made it impossible to pass. Like I’d seen with Battery last night, he could make it so impossible to pass that it bounced you back as hard as you hit it. 

It was hard to see through the press of people, but it looked like the taxi was still on the far side of the street. I hoped he’d come back from wherever he’d gone. I tugged on Peyton’s arm but he resisted me. 

“Come on,” I said. 

He pointed. “That’s Skidmark’s car. They’ve got my girl inside. They’ve got Annie.” 

Most of the Merchants were in the cars that had barricaded the street from the Bay proper. This car was a lot nearer, parked on the curb closest to us, and the windows were tinted. We didn’t have time for this. 

“How the hell am I supposed to get her out?”

He was spared from answering me. Skidmark was here. He kicked open the main door to the apartments, and looked at me again. He had a gun in his hand. There were Merchants behind him. 

“Who the fuck are you?” 

“I’m a new Ward!” I lied. Driving Peyton ahead of me I opened my umbrella behind us. No shots rang out. He didn’t need to shoot, not with his power. We made it almost to the street, almost the crowd. A splash of colour struck the ground ahead of me, all the way to his own car. 

I spun, and another struck the ground on the other side of me. Then his power started to chase me. It was like tetris pieces, jerking closer to me in colorful strips of blue and violet. I could see it beneath what my umbrella hid behind me. Color, chasing our feet. When the first stripe got ahead of me I stumbled, but kept my balance. It slowed me enough that he got another layer under me. Then that layer got brighter. Brighter still. It was like being pushed by a full grown man. My umbrella clattered away from me, and we both fell, spilling over the sidewalk onto the street. We were yards from the crowd, who backed away from us like a wave drawing back into the sea. 

Peyton groaned. I didn’t have the luxury, even with my knee suddenly white-hot. I grabbed him and heaved, gasping, pulling us behind the far tire of Skidmark’s truck. 

“Fuck you going to do now?” called Skidmark. 

It was faint but it was there. The current in me was exploding, it felt fuller than it ever had before, building quicker, the fever pitch hum boiling over, ready to burst, and I felt it. Felt the faint resonance, the pitch of my ring. It was high, it was different, but it was there.

I let it go, and the ring on my finger changed. It turned a dull, crystalline grey. 

“I’m not buying it,” Skidmark shouted. “That costume is a piece of shit, too shitty for a Ward.” 

I ignored him. My ring was different, but transformed; that second resonance was still there. The power. 

“I reckon I can shoot you. Then I can shoot that snitch ass piece of shit cock-sucker you’re with. And then I _won’t_ shoot his girlfriend. Not until she’s made me the money I lost on my cannon, and that shit was expensive.” 

From this angle, with just a little duck, I could see under the car. Skidmark wasn’t just ranting, he was distracting us. The feet of the gang members who had followed him out the building were heading in opposite directions, to gain sight lines around the cars and flank us. 

I tried to transform my umbrella, my sneakers, but the resonance that had returned to the ring hadn’t come back to them. I let my current flow back into my other things, exhaustion growing a little nearer. I hadn’t been charging the ring though, so why had that come back to me but not the others? 

It didn’t matter, it’d let me do what I needed to. 

“Peyton,” I hissed, “paint the car. Paint it and make it glow as brightly as you can.” 

He did as I asked. He touched the car, and after a second it started to shine, more and more brightly. It wasn’t Purity, it wasn’t the _sun_ , but it got to the point where it was hard to look at. Perfect. 

I stood, pulling on the door’s plastic door-handle. No luck. I activated my ring’s power and punched the glass as hard as I could. The glass didn’t crack but my fist did. And it _hurt_. Despite the ring, it _hurt_. I hissed, cradling my hand for a split second. This wasn’t right. Tinkertech window? Or I wasn’t as strong as I’d thought. Why did it hurt?

The light was beginning to fade. I tugged at the handle again with my ring hand. Shit. There was a feeling though, like something tickling at the hair on my arm. I touched the metal, the seam where the back door met the back panel. I pushed. It deformed. It was like pushing against taut saran wrap. I dug my fingers in and gripped the edge, ripping the door open. 

“In!”

I hauled Peyton onto the back seat then dived in after him. The door closed most of the way, but it was too damaged. It wouldn’t click shut. 

“Annie,” he called through broken lips. I kept my non-busted hand on his head, keeping him down from the profile of the window. Skidmark was still at the main entrance, not approaching the car. Annie was sitting in the front seat; she was maybe twenty? No one would take her for a senior, but she was definitely young. Her straight black hair didn’t cover her black eye. I didn’t notice anything else; my eyes were drawn to the silver handcuffs that secured her to the passenger side door. They’d cuffed each wrist, with the chain fed through the inside handle. 

“Peyton. Holy shit! What did they do to you?” 

There was the crack of a pistol from outside. It hit the window, loudly, but the window didn’t crack. Skidmark’s tinker had definitely armored the car. I glanced through the window quickly. Skidmark was throwing layers down, between himself and the car, more and more. 

“Talk later.” I clambered over the armrest in the middle of the two seats upfront, easing myself into the driver’s position. I checked the driver’s side door, under the sun visor — nothing. The only reason he could be building a wall, the only reason I could think of, was Skidmark thought I might try and run him over, which meant… 

“There’s keys here. I couldn’t get them to my hands.” Annie tapped a foot on something in her footwell. 

“Ridiculous,” I said, disbelieving. The car started with a roar and I slammed it into reverse, shooting back. The crowd had all run by now, most of them fleeing down the street in the direction I wanted to go. I had never driven before. This wasn’t easy. _Get on the sidewalk, people._

More shots hit the car to little effect. I spun the wheel hard, just as Skidmark lay down another glowing strip. It helped us more than it hurt, turning the car sharply to face the other way. I flicked the lever to drive, and put the pedal to the floor. The tinker had done more than mess with the exterior. It _roared_ , it _leaped_. 

We were bouncing over the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street before I could control the car, rumbling over the thin strip between the Bay Village and the seawall. We crashed into big boulders, noise pointed down at the sea, and I fell up half onto the dash, the steering wheel hitting me in the ribs, the car horn squawking briefly.

Peyton groaned from where he’d fallen into the rear seat footwell. Annie was hissing, pulling at her handcuffs. 

“Everyone ok?” I asked. 

“Where did you learn to drive?” she asked. 

I flicked it into reverse. The wheels spun uselessly. Nth Fuck. 

Reaching across the central divider, I pushed Annie back against the chair. The small key to the handcuffs came out my belt and I fiddled around, unlocking it at the awkward angle. They popped open with a click, and I pulled them off. I had them, finally. Still, I wasn’t quite ready to celebrate yet. I put them back in a pouch.

Annie rubbed her wrists, frowning at me, but didn’t say anything. I was already looking out the window, back towards the block. We’d made it a good fifty yards from the building, but I could see a few Merchants running towards us. Merchants didn’t wear particular colors like the ABB, that I knew, nor did they have specific tattoos like the Empire either. You could just tell. 

“Can you run?” I asked. 

Peyton shook his head. I believed him. 

“We can’t outrun them,” said Annie, “we need to show them we’re too much to handle.” 

Not what I was expecting to hear. Not what I was expecting to see either. She had a pistol in her hand. The passenger side glove-box was open, and I could see ammo and a couple more small guns, too. 

Annie clambered into the back seats, in a whirl of bony arms and legs, the gun passing over me three times while she moved. Jesus. “Move, Peyton.” She got him onto the other side of the car. “Are your powers going to be any use in scaring them off?”

I shook my head. Said, “No.” 

“Get a gun.” 

I did. There were two – one was modern, and the other was something out of a detective film, smaller and kinda brassy looking. I took it. Hopefully older and smaller meant it would do less damage to anyone I hit. Fuck. I had to do it though. It was heavier in the hand than I had expected. It felt… ominous. 

The crack of Annie’s pistol firing made me jump. Everything changed. The car rang like a can when they fired back. There were screams. The people from the apartments running away from the city, just scattering in every direction.

Annie had cranked the window a little so the barrel of the gun could poke through. I dropped mine, pointed the little pistol through. 

Two Merchants were running away down the street towards the barricade — which was rapidly disassembling itself, junk being pushed over, car lights turning on. 

It was so loud. Skidmark stood on his own, on the sidewalk, gun firing at us. I couldn’t hear him but I could see him gesticulating between shots, and I knew that he was swearing. He had a man closer to us, open, walking along the coast side of the street. I took aim, fired, and I heard the crack, saw the stone shatter near his feet. He fired back, fell, shots wild, before finding his feet and running. 

The next closest was _almost_ entirely open, where he leaned against a streetlight. I moved my gun along the lip of the window, but before I fired, he fell, screamed, spinning from the shoulder. 

“Shit, I think I hit one. Peyton, get me some ammo from the glove box.” Annie fired again. 

Skidmark was raging. This was it. He was the closest now. I aimed. The trigger was hard to pull, not emotionally — I was too numb, I was just _doing_ — but like the first shot it took a lot of effort. The gun bucked, there was a crack, I saw a clod of the grass near his feet kick up. Did it dip low? That was twice now. I aimed. Fired. Skidmark fell. 

Then he was straight back up, swearing as much before. Winged him. He shot at us rapidly, four shots in a row, until I could see he was still aiming but nothing was happening. His guys were piling into their cars. There were eight cars and five of them were already taking off, along the road that shot inland, after the bridge. 

Annie fired again, one of his men had to grab Skidmark by the shoulder. He pushed at them, threw his gun to the ground — I could just faintly hear his screaming — and then he was forced into a car. The tires spun, I heard the roar of the engine and they clipped the corner. They’d left one of their guys behind, and he was running after them. 

I saw why. The BBPD were here, blue lights flashing and sirens wailing, with the eerie green lights of one heavy duty van full of PRT officers. That wasn’t it, wasn’t how they must have got past Skidmark’s power. 

At the front of them all, lined in neon lights, wheel spinning in the same fluorescent blue, was Armsmaster. Leader of the Protectorate ENE, and one of the greatest tinkers in the world. He looked like a cyberpunk knight, his legendary halberd spearing feet ahead of his bike as he took the corner. Then he was gone. 

I was sweaty. I’d barely done anything but I was sweaty. 

“Everyone okay?” 

Peyton laughed over Annie’s response, his laugh thick because of his swollen lips. There was an ambulance, two, that I could see, coming over the bridge behind the fire trucks. 

“I’ll help you two to the ambulance,” I said, “then I’ve got to run.” 

With Annie and I taking one side each, we pulled him out of Skidmark’s truck, helped him over the sea wall and back onto the sidewalk. 

“I owe you,” he said. I grunted. “I mean it. I owe you, spooky market girl. You ever need _anything,_ you hit me up. I promise.” I froze. He’d put two and two together, had realised who I was. 

“How?” I asked. What had given it away, was there some obvious tell that I had? 

“Shoes,” he said. “Never seen sneakers like that before.” 

I let us stumble along to the ambulances, digesting that. It was slow going. There were a couple of cop cars parked up, lights silently spinning over the dark grass, talking to the people returning to their flats. The fire service was securing the building. 

“Okay,” I said. 

“I won’t be here again. Don’t have a phone at the moment,” 

Annie spoke, from the other side of him. “I’ll give you my cell.” 

“Or you can leave a message at the Palanquin, I go there,” he said. 

I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t. The promise of a favor from another cape was nice, but it was easily given when you’d been saved from someone beating you half to death. I wasn’t going to hold my breath. 

An EMT met us close to the ambulance, calling his colleague over with a trolley. We lowered Peyton down. 

“It was Skidmark,” I offered. One of them looked at me, their eyes lingering on the mask, obviously on edge. But then they took to assessing him, taking his name, asking him questions, shining a pen torch in his eyes. His girlfriend was right there with him, hand on his hand, making encouraging noises, being reassuring. And she’d been shooting people minutes earlier. 

This wasn’t the peaceful day I’d wanted. But then I’d been shot yesterday, so the whole weekend was kind of a bust. 

“Good luck,” I said. I didn’t know if they heard me. I just wanted to get home. I was so tired. My legs were jelly. I ached. Whatever strength the adrenaline had lent me was now coming due, and I was in debt. 

The taxi, yards down the street past the ambulance, was still there, somehow. Its vanishing taxi driver was leaning against the front bonnet. Smoking. Like he was waiting in a Starbucks parking lot. 

“Let’s go,” I said. 

“You don’t need to answer any questions?” He was frowning. I was not in the mood. 

“Where were you?” I asked. 

“Got tough on your brother, did you?” I stared at him through my costume lenses, he stared right back. Then he opened the back seat. I got in. 

The barrel of the gun dug into my back, where I’d put it in my belt pouch. Another secret for the basement floor. 

“Where to?” he asked. We rolled out, heading back into the city, the ambulances, the flashing lights sliding by, outside the window. 

“Lord Street then onto Beacon Hill Parkway.” It was close enough that I could walk back without too much difficulty, and he wouldn’t have seen where I lived. Armsmaster and his support had to have caught Skidmark by now, or else have lost him completely. Maybe they were fighting right now, as I was heading home. 

“I saw there were Merchants,” the driver said. They hadn’t exactly been subtle. The observation wasn’t going to win him a Pulitzer. “They were pulling up, so I got out, took a look around, saw something was going down, called the police. Got you your backup.” 

My backup? We reached the other side of Archer’s Bridge, and he turned back in his seat to face me, a business card between his fingertips. “If I’m going to be your cape chauffeur, you’ll need my number. Name’s Glen,” he said, “and I reckon this deserves more than a hundred.” 

I took the card numbly. I hadn’t changed back. I was _still_ in my costume. Fuck. Fuck for the nth time plus one. 

“What should I call you, anyway?” he asked. 

“I was thinking Overshadow,” I said. I saw his lips quirk in the rearview mirror. “It’s a work in progress,” I snapped. 

I gave him the 1100 bucks I had left.

***** *****

Dad yelled at me for disappearing when I got back (sans costume, which had been shoved beneath the back porch for now). Not a lot, not loudly, but enough that it was shocking. It should’ve been a bad end to a bad day, but I was elated the whole time.

Dad had a radio, an old thing from his college days that he kept in the kitchen and listened to when he was brooding. The whole time he was interrogating me it crackled away in the background. Local news. 

_‘And to repeat, breaking news: we’re receiving reports that local Brockton Bay supervillain ‘Skidmark’ has been arrested after a ten car chase through the city, captured by Protectorate East-North-East leader Armsmaster. Details as they become available.’_

I’d done it. We’d got him.

***** *****


	11. 2.2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I moved house a couple of days after the last chapter, so apologies this was a little slow. I don't actually have wifi until tomorrow. The data plan struggle is real. Any and all feedback welcome as always. I've gone a little bit overboard on a few things I read about in a recent book 'Elements of Eloquence' by Forsythe - hilarious and educational, recommend. 
> 
> Thanks to everyone who helped beta this chapter.

**2.2**

***** *****

“Or what?”

Sophia’s eyes narrowed, and from the deep parts of my skull a voice said ‘mistake’. Never wave a red flag at a bull if you’re not in any condition to move quickly. The weekend had gotten to me, my successes and failures had made the school small. 

For so long, I had been trying to prove to myself that I was better than them, that I wouldn’t sink to their level. But they didn’t notice or care; the conversation with Emma had shown that. I’d been labouring under a false paradigm, that we could go back, that I could rise above. That my doing the right thing could encourage their stopping the wrong thing. 

Evidently, I’d forgotten all that in an instant, the words out of my mouth before Sophia had even finished her fly-by threat. 

She stopped, turning to me, and I stepped back, up against my closed locker. 

“Or what?” I repeated. _What are you doing, Taylor?_

I was taller than her, but only just. The corridor was crowded, in the rush before the end of school, and there weren’t any teachers. Emma was absent, the regular faces were missing. 

“You going to hit me?” _Just stop,_ I told myself. 

She took me by my hoodie with two fists and pinned me against my locker. My efforts to stand straight helped her, pulling as I pushed forward then tripping me back, keeping me off balance. 

“Feeling tough today, Hebert?” 

_Tougher than you_ , I thought. I didn’t say it, I just looked away. Meeting fire with fire burned the whole house down. I’d always believed that, even if my five day career as a professional hero begged to differ. 

Sophia’s brown eyes were locked on my face. She was considering her options. Despite my provoking her, experience said this would go easily, without Madison and the others there. She’d growl, I’d say something, she’d punch, and then she’d go on to whatever it was she did when I wasn’t in sight. Without Emma, what was the point? It wasn’t personal for Sophia and I. 

I was completely wrong. She let go of me and grabbed for my ring, my mother’s ring. When she hit the floor, I looked around to see who had hit her. Then my hand started to burn, and I realised it was me. 

“Fight! Fight! Fight!” We had attracted a crowd. The other students in the corridor surrounded us, cutting off escape in either direction. I froze, but we were beyond that now. Sophia was getting back up, and she was going to get even. 

“Think you’re a top bitch, huh, Hebert?” Her fists came up in a guard, and she stepped closer. I wanted to fight her, I wanted her to hit me, I wanted to hit her right back. I had outrun more than a dozen Empire thugs. I had been shot. I had shot _at_ people. Who the fuck was _she_? 

She was lightning fast, her hooks coming one after the other. I only saw her fist drawing back to her body, _after_ the blows; gasping where she hit my side, stumbling where she caught me on the cheek. 

I tried to turn the boxing into a grapple, going low like a linebacker, wedging my shoulder in her stomach, I tried to stand up, pull her off her legs. Her elbows hammered my back, each one stinging more than the last. Little stabs of fire. It was maybe a few seconds, it felt a lot longer, but I gave first, letting go, pushing off of her backwards. She let me go. Our eyes met, she was breathing lightly, watching me. I stood tall. 

Her eyes narrowed, her guard rose. I watched her fists; her kick caught me in the knee. I screamed, fell, and then she had my hand again, twisting it so that my palm faced towards the back wall and my elbow was locked, twisting so hard that I was sure she was going to break my arm. 

“Give the fuck up,” she said, quietly. Controlled. Victorious.

I hissed again as she twisted further, lightning shooting all along my arm. “Now what will you do?” All I could focus on was the pain, but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. I wouldn’t. Not her, not the baying spectators. “Nice ring, Hebert. I think that’ll do as an apology.” I tried to turn, but she moved with me, keeping my arm fully extended. I could see her face, her teeth white and smiling. 

I transformed my ring, just for a second. It was enough. The pain vanished into burning cold on my finger, and I could turn through the lock, just a little bit, as far as bone would let me. Enough that I faced her, but not enough to kick her, to stand, to throw her off, to punch or to fight. It didn’t matter. My head was close to her hand. I bit her. 

I bit her as hard as I could, till I was certain my teeth must be close to touching on each side of her forearm. Her skin was salty. At first. She screamed. Clumsy punches hit my head, but she let go of my arm, and I fell back onto my ass. 

We were going to be wearing this fight for a week. The throbbing in my temple proved that; I knew I’d bruise, badly. _She_ was cradling her arm against her chest, backing up against the crowd. They weren’t chanting anymore. 

There was wetness on my chin. She didn’t say anything when I stood, and I didn’t give the crowd the chance to do anything else. Pushing through them was easy, they all drew back when I got near. No sign of a teacher, I guess it hadn’t been that long. The book bag was a weight on my right shoulder, but it was my left that burned, that felt like it was a stranger’s arm, dead and painful. 

Outside. I was free, at least for a day. _Take the phone off the hook a little, so if they call it doesn’t get through_. Our answering machine had been busted for months, one more non-priority on my dad’s to-do list. 

The cold air was sweet, I was sweating, I realised. Just a little, on my face, and my bruised temples. I’d have to use the make-up I never used, and concealer. When my feet took me round the corner of Winslow’s chain-link fence, I flickered my ring back to shadow, hand in pocket. 

I’d been a cape for a week and I was already blurring the lines, solving school problems violently, using my powers at school. My mom had always said that ‘letting your anger out’ and all that sort of naturalistic stuff was phoney baloney. That all it did was make anger a habit, rather than self-control. All my hard work, all my restraint for a _year_ was down the drain. Thrown away because I couldn’t let her take my ring, in the moment. What would I be like a year from now, if every week was like my first week? What about two? 

As my feet meandered round the docks, towards home, the question repeated itself. It was like a sore tooth, I couldn’t stop probing it.

I wasn’t stupid. 

I flickered my sneakers into that translucent, dark crystal they preferred. Whatever Dauntless’s power had done to mine when he attacked me, it hadn’t taken long to come back. Different in how it felt to me and, after a while, different in how it changed my things. Until Sophia had fought me. And now my power had two feels to it. The new one, and the old. 

Sophia was violent, really violent. She was aggressive and rude, in a way none of the rest of the bullies were, none of the other girls. It was because she was a cape. She had been for at least as long as I’d had my power.

My power had been copying hers, in some way, for as long as I’d had it. I felt sick. Violated. I wanted to _punch_ something. If this was me after a week, how long had Sophia had powers? A really fucking long time. 

Someone turned the corner onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street, and I reverted my sneakers in an instant. The two energies inside me poured back, dispersing endlessly, overlapping, like ripples from two pebbles thrown into a breaking wave. Two pitches, low was what I was used to. High turned my ring into that faintly grey crystalline material of last night. The new form didn’t mess with the eyes, didn’t duck under the light in the same way as the old. A dull lustre, like Lithium, when you cut it in Chemistry and left it open to the air.

Grey was Battery’s energy, as used by me. So who was Sophia? There were at least a dozen parahumans in the city I’d not heard of, probably, there was no way I could be certain who she was. No way. But I was, I knew it, in my bones. 

There were two choices, two darkness powered parahumans in the Bay. Shadow Stalker was a definite girl, a Ward, who had joined the city’s official juniors squad at the start of the school year. She looked a bit edgy, but the Protectorate’s sidekicks went to Arcadia, she was new, and Sophia had been a dick for much longer than Shadow Stalker had been in the Wards. No, Sophia was a villain. Sophia was Grue.

Practically nothing was known about her, except that she was a villain and she made shadows. She was one of the wiki’s villain stubs that I’d checked on Friday, and it made too much sense. A thief and a thug, she’d keep her sadistic tendencies secret. She’d rob the weak, as a pretext for beating on them. It clicked. I _knew_ I was right. 

One day, I’d take her. Outside of school. When I was strong, we’d have our rematch. I’d drag Grue into the light, and I’d make her choke on it. Fantasies of violence coddled me, all the way home, and my ring burned on my finger.

***** *****

I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it yesterday, and I was enjoying it today. It was the feeling of being the one to make the move, active, to figure something out and _do_ it. Yesterday, north of the rills, the unexpected had completely derailed me, but tonight? Tonight, I had things under control. I could look before I leaped. Though, from the roof of the skyscraper, I didn’t want to.

Woburn wasn’t a good idea right now, but, fortunately for me, the Empire were spread widely throughout Brockton and its surrounding suburbia. Downtown was the gang fulcrum. It was the place where you could find dealers of every stripe: a gallery of gang tags, past and present; excepting the Merchants, who were pretty firmly kept out. 

From up here, it was difficult to tell who was who. I had to get lower. The wind rippled across the balaclava beneath my Venetian mask, tugging at my outer vest. There were maybe eighty to a hundred parahumans amongst Brockton Bay’s 350,000 residents, and definitely fewer than that who could fly, but I didn’t want to be incautious. It didn’t do to establish bad habits. 

The next building over was maybe fifty feet below me and fifteen feet away. From there I could get closer to ground level by getting to the rooftop one floor above it, then the building on that one’s right. Ok. 

The resonance inside me swapped, the ‘volume’ of my older energy swelling, and all my items turned to their more familiar forms. With my ring burning cold, my battered legs ran as fast as ever and I leapt off the roof. My heart was racing. I knew my powers were back. I knew I was fine, but I had jumped off a twenty-something story building. The streetlights and the roads and the people looked like legos from up here. 

I opened my umbrella, held it tightly, and let it drop me at what felt like too fast. It didn’t have the strength to beat gravity yet, but for now it stopped me going splat. Bend knees, land, success. The next building had a rooftop ten feet higher than this one, but there was no gap, brickwork rising up abruptly where they joined. 

I changed band again, and all my things flickered to that new lustrous, solid gray. My umbrella looked strange like this. Sleeker, slimmer, with just a knotty crystalline base for a handle that let me grip it, the rest one solid spur, I slipped it into the loop on my belt. It was no use here. The ache of my legs came back suddenly, as the ring’s previous effect faded. Annoying, but it wasn’t for long. 

The attraction happened just a moment before my shoes touched the wall. I activated the power and my toes stuck, and I was splayed out like a spider. If I had more core strength I could’ve stood out straight; I’d tried earlier and my spine had felt like it would snap.

I pushed up, as if starting to sprint, and swapped back. My sneakers returned to shadow, and I dashed up the wall in that half-second before I lost my grip. Another quick switch and my sneakers secured me to the roof ledge I was now teetering on. From there, it was a quick run, jump, and a dizzying umbrella drift to the next rooftop. 

There was a guy. He was bald, and I could see tattoos; even in the winter he wore a tee, and he had a greasy apron over the top. He had a moustache that reminded me of the cop I’d met on Lord Street last week, and, in the alley that separated this rooftop from the taller building further along, he was smoking a sickly cigarette. 

He wasn’t dealing, didn’t look to be actively hassling anyone – he was just there. But he had the look. I gnawed on my lip for a moment. If there was one thing that last week had taught me, it was that when you hesitated in front of an opportunity, it hurt. 

The umbrella opened and I dropped down. With my shoes in their shadow form, I landed silently behind him then swapped it out for Battery’s frequency immediately. I knew what the sneakers did, the ring, too. What would my umbrella do? All I knew was that throwing it in this form returned it to normal, the instant it left my hand. Ranged was out. 

I plucked at the umbrella’s frequency with my power, it hummed in my hand, and then I hit him in the legs. He fell with a muttered ‘fuck’! His cigarette skittered over the alley, dimly dancing cinders into the dark. 

“Tell me what I want to know!” I growled. I jabbed him with the umbrella, catching him above the clavicle. There wasn’t anything I could see, but there was the feel of crackling, and his head pulled back and his arm twitched. I stopped. A taser then. That wasn’t all, there was more to it, more to discover. The secret was there, conspicuous in the further parts of the umbrella’s hum. 

“Tell me where the Empire leadership store their drugs, their money, all of it.” 

He groaned but he wasn’t out of it, his eyes tracked the grey umbrella as I brought it close to his chin again. 

“What the fuck!” 

He had a metal belt on, underneath the apron. When I activated my ring, I could feel the sensation of its buckle, like the wind on the hairs of my arm. He wasn’t big, taller than _me_ , but he wasn’t big. I grabbed the buckle through his apron and with my ring’s help dragged him further into the alley, up against the wall. 

“Don’t make me ask again!” I said, voice as low and deep as I could make it. He had tattoos, a couple in the usual pattern, but this close I could see patches of pale skin, paler than the rest of him. Some were shaped like swastikas and the letter H. 

“I’m not Empire. I’m not.” He rubbed at his head, where he was bleeding slightly. “I’m bald.”

I jabbed the umbrella into his stomach with a flare of power. “I won’t ask again.” 

The effect wasn’t strong enough to make him seize, or really convulse, but where it was touching his stomach he twitched, and without control of his abdomen he couldn’t speak, could only writhe. Was this too much? Could you fuck up someone’s breathing with a tazer? He was a Nazi… 

I didn’t want to do any lasting harm, not to anyone. Not like this. I stood over him, and stopped the singing of my power. It took several moments for him to catch his breath and then he stood. Stepping back, I let him. 

“You’re not leaving till you to tell me what I want to hear.” I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt. 

Moustache looked at me, his thick apron askew. “I’m _not_ with them,” he said. 

I scoffed. He yelled. He pulled up his sleeve, exposing his tattoos. “Look. Look!” he shouted. “Look.” He pointed to the paler skin, next to a faded black eagle. “Fucking. I gave up everything to leave them,” his voice caught, “so don’t you–” 

I wasn’t sure what to do. Tattoo removal; it had worked and it hadn’t worked, it was still obvious what had been there, who he had been. Maybe his information was out of date, but it would still be more than _I_ knew. 

“I don’t care--” 

He pushed me. He reached out with one hand and pushed me on the shoulder, not hard. Enough to rock me, to make a noise. It was my bad arm. He did it once, twice, made a fist and hit his own chest on the third movement. His eyes were red, it was that more than anything that got me. It didn’t feel good, it didn’t feel like I was taking on unrepentant evil. Repentant evil, though, maybe. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. 

“I was raised Empire, but I ain’t Empire. _I’m not Empire_.” He made to step past me, to leave, on unsteady legs.

Two steps backward, reflexive, I retreated and the magic was broken. We both knew it.

I ran, down the alley, feet clattering on the concrete till I swapped to shadow for a dash and silent escape. Flitting between the two forms, I slipped up the sheer wall to the rooftop past lightbulbs in wire cages, over the course of a minute, but there was no sound of pursuit. On the rooftop, my breath caught me up. 

I wasn’t a Nazi apologist, never had been, never would be. I hated the Empire, like I hated the ABB, and the smaller villain teams and their henchman. Saying you were sorry, what fucking good was that? Didn’t mean he was any less scum than before, except… It hadn’t been that that had beaten me. The anger, the hurt, like _I_ had used something shared, melted truth into an unkind corkscrew, and slipped it in the ribs. 

It was September. He was me, and I was her. I cried.

***** *****

Tuesday wasn’t a good day, but it wasn’t a bad one either. A skittish school day, there was the pervasive fear that one of Principal Blackwell’s secretaries would step through the door at any instant, and the nerves wore on me.

The morning was Biology and English; the coming afternoon was shortened Music and extended Phys. Ed. I ditched. I took my prepared and loving white-bread sandwich and coke and hightailed it home. Looking over my shoulder for Sophia’s inevitable reprisal was exhausting, and I was exhausted. 

There had been a promise made, from myself to myself, that I was going to go to school. I’d written it in my journal, beliefs that I held close to myself. 1. School is important. 2. I need to prepare for a future after Winslow. 3. The bullying won’t last. The last one was the most important. One day I’d be fifty and I’d look back and all this would be distant and small, a raincloud on the horizon, the wind blowing out to sea. 

Waiting for the other shoe to drop, I bailed on all my promises. Relief and shame curdled, but there was satisfaction in the knot, too. At least at home I could spend time charging my more neglected items. My umbrella and my handcuffs, mostly. The gun in my bedroom weighed on my mind, but I’d ignore that for now. Already, it had a couple of hours from yesterday. There was only so much I could do at once. 

At home, I was undisturbed. I plucked at my power and turned my ring dark, then activated its power, watching tiny tendrils of evaporating shadow boil out. The chill returned to my finger, and the ache left my hip. 

The wound was coming along well, a small gouge over the bone of my hip. It was healing quickly, more quickly than I thought was reasonable to suspect was reasonable. I’d forgo charging the ring tonight, and leave it active, if I could. Test if they stayed transformed when I was asleep. I could be certain that it was doing more than anaesthetising the pain if it had a whole night to work. 

There was some bacon in the fridge, some eggs. The sandwich could wait to disappoint until tomorrow. In the den, I pulled the lever on Dad’s chair, kicked back, looked out the window, at the tv, at my sneakers. 

This would be a great time to go out. Patrolling at night, even with my new ability to skip the front door and climb in through the window, created certain challenges. My dad, foremost. Patrolling in the day time would solve that, would make people think I wasn’t a teen, and skipping school wouldn’t feel quite so much like I was quitting, like I was failing myself or my mom. My fork scraped against the empty plate. The TV babbled the inane thoughts of the Real Cape Wives of Houston. 

My costume was nearly repaired from wearing it at night, I could go right now. There was still so much to do. I needed an Empire thug to lead me to an Empire hideout, an Empire hideout to stash the duffle bag, to stash the duffle bag to draw out Lung, and to draw out Lung to distract and destroy the Empire. The Empire had followed me back to this street. They were a plague, a scourge, and very much a sword of Damocles over my head.

Still, the knot in my stomach didn’t disappear. _Time’s a ticking_ , _Taylor_. I didn’t want to do what I’d done yesterday, didn’t want to make that association with myself again. It was psychology, it was trauma, and when I looked at the basement door I couldn’t just _not_ not want to go down those stairs, even with my weighty to-do list. 

I gave myself an out. There were other things I could be doing, productive things. 

Upstairs, I pulled out my power journals. I was falling behind. I wrote new headings for my new things, cleverly writing gun backwards: I really needed to look up a cypher. I did a little sketch of my necklace, the white gold gnostic medallion with its weird script spiraling in, and skipped that step for the _nuG_. Then I unboxed my new smartphone. 

It was sleek, it was new, it was suitably distracting. It was the most expensive thing I had ever owned. _Money can’t buy happiness,_ a voice supplied. _Absence of money doesn’t secure it_ , either, I replied. This was _cool_. It had a touch screen, it was black, and the sides had thin strips of neon lights all along the border, evocative of tinkertech. It was fully charged; in one sense. 

A fingertip delicate and cold tapped its only button, and I _pushed_ , felt the connection snap taut. Oily current and energetic vibration infiltrated, settling into the center, becoming richer, denser until I could almost feel it solidify, less an energy and something more miniscule, crystalizing. It was done. 

I powered the phone on.

_Wel̢͟͟͡c͜͢o͢͟͡m̡̧̡̡e̢̨͟_. 

Uh oh. The screen flickered, then died, and wouldn’t turn on again. 

That wasn’t right. My power had worked on everything I had tried, from armchairs to microwave ovens. I tried the power button again, then plugged it in to charge. No change. 

I flipped to the page I kept on my power itself, at the back, separated by pages of blank grids from the nearest item. I drew a line through _works on electronics_. 

_Works on appliances equal to or simpler than a microwave oven._  
 _Does not work on smartphones._

I’d return it as broken on purchase. Hopefully, having paid cash wouldn’t make that tricky. I still had the brick. My cape phone. As long as the palm of my hand, and as ugly as Dad’s dock work boots, and probably as tough. 

The bed creaked at my weight, I looked out the window, tapping my fingers against the window sill. It was about four o'clock and the sun was setting. A wash of oranges covered the sky, except for over the Protectorate HQ in the Bay. It wasn’t visible from here, but the light of its forcefield painted the low clouds in rainbow. It was chilly. I tapped my foot, I fidgeted, I fretted, and I didn’t go out. Dad got home an hour later. 

“Taylor, damn it. What is this?” he started loud, but crumbled quickly. Quick to irritate, quicker to suppress it, that was our way. Still, I was quiet when I hurried downstairs. He was pulling out the skillet I’d thrown in the sink. 

“Here,” he said, and he put down an opened letter on the table. 

“What is it?” Dad just grunted and the grunt said ‘nothing good, but I’m trying to pretend I’m not stressed’, washing bacon grease under the tap. The letter was from the PRT, asking us to attend the local BBPD station this weekend. They would need my statement in order to progress any criminal charges further, and apparently they didn’t take witness interviews in the PRT skyscraper that sat in the center of downtown. 

Whether they were pursuing charges against Purity or the gangsters she’d clobbered was unclear. 

Dad had read it, and it had been an entire weekend since my run in with them, but he was scrubbing very vigorously. 

“Are you going to ask me about it?” I said. 

“Will you tell me?” 

I hesitated, too long. “You never told me why you stopped going to the charity,” he said, “and you never tell me about school. I don’t know how to ask anymore, not in any way that works.” 

It was his tone. He still wasn’t looking at me, his shoulder blade working as he scrubbed, steel-wool scratching. Wheedling, that was his voice. Sulky. Maybe it was ungenerous. It didn’t make me feel bad, or not all bad, mostly it irritated me. 

I bit my tongue. “I’m teenaging, probably.” There was a pause before he decided to laugh. 

“Yeah, probably.” 

Come on, Taylor. Be the bigger woman. 

“Come with me, on Saturday?” My voice inflected. I hadn’t meant to _ask_ , but I did. At least I wouldn’t have to tell the same story twice, and there was nothing I had to say that would incriminate me. 

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll get dinner started soon.” That was my out. I left him to it, heading upstairs, the floorboards creaking. 

My mind was already turning back to the Empire. I was losing time, losing opportunities. The guy from last night, how I had felt, weighed on my mind, but I had done too much already. The money wasn’t going anywhere: I _had_ to keep moving, I had to get over myself. 

Dad called out as I climbed. “Maybe you can tell me where you were last night, as well.” 

Fuck.

***** *****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: read a recent thing about recommending fics that you like, that you've read recently, after chapters you post. I like the idea. 
> 
> I've just started this and it seems really, really good:
> 
> Redoubt by Plum Colored Blazer :
> 
> Summary: There's a new parahuman in Brockton Bay, a tinker with a penchant for energy shielding. Determined to escape the life she's been leading in the reeking heart of ABB territory, she sets out to reinvent her circumstances. Problem is, she's joining the Wards to do it, and she's not especially "heroic" by anybody's standards.


	12. 2.3

**2.3**

***** *****

CQC: close quarters combat.

A cape who wielded a magical umbrella-taser needed to get close, and getting close was dangerous. The answer was obvious. I needed to learn how to fight well. I needed to learn how to swing an umbrella like I was on a PGA tour, and learn the sort of wrist locks that Sophia had used. 

Why, then, had I answered my Dad’s question about my late night disappearance with ‘running’? When push came to shove, my sneakers would cover most of the distance for me and my ring would hide the stitch, so _why had I told him I had taken up running?_

My lungs were on fire and my feet plodded onward toward the Atlantic, now only capable of a gait more duck-like than human. The temptation to just use my ring to mask the fatigue was nearly overwhelming. 

I’d feel different when it was over. This was just the fact that my face was as red as a tomato, and that every person who had ever said runner’s high was a real thing was awaiting trial in the Hague. _Make it to the coast, then rest_. 

At Lord Street I caught my breath, leaning against the wooden fence that separated me from the Boardwalk, wiping the sweat from my forehead. It was a Thursday morning, and everything was pretty quiet. I had yet to return to school. It would be easier after the weekend. Not easy, definitely not easy, but easier. Sophia’s revenge was going to be bad, no matter what I did. 

I still hadn’t gone out, hadn’t found my Empire hideout, hadn’t progressed my plan. I _had_ planned to, but each morning when Dad had left, my resolve unravelled. There was a knot in my stomach that twisted whenever I reached for my costume. 

I _had_ to overcome this. 

Instead of going North, turning back into the Docks and heading home, I ran towards Downtown and the commercial zone near the Towers, where a week ago I had been shot by Nazis. It felt far more recent than that, moments ago, now. As I ran I passed a couple of ABB sitting on the step of an apartment building; they watched me pass, stopped talking until I was gone. 

I had only been on patrol once and it had gotten me chased, shocked, robbed, depowered, and electrocuted. Every time I put on the costume something bad happened, and the association had wormed itself into my subconscious. This was natural, this was reasonable, but I had to just _do_ it anyway and get over myself. 

The Empire were the premier racist gang in all New England, the jewel in Brockton Bay’s corroded crown. They were a pillar of their fucked up community, the gang older than me, practically ancient in gang terms. 

Hardly any of their capes were local to the city. They came because of the Empire’s two-decade reputation, and because Brockton was a good place to be a racist villain. It was a port city that didn’t ship, following the prolonged strikes that had sunk freighters in the harbour ages ago, and that meant that dishonest work was easier for most than anything that wasn’t cash in hand. In a majority white city that meant good pickings for the Empire. The other reason was logistical. Dad was pretty clear about it, half the drugs for the east coast came through the city’s half-abandoned port, and even the Protectorate planting their flag in the literal Bay hadn’t done a lot to curb that. 

That was their strength then — manpower and legacy — the reason that they had so many capes. They even had capes come from as far away as Europe, the wiki had been clear about that. Though I didn’t buy that there was some Nazi exchange programme offering go-getter racists a year in industry. That seemed a stretch too far. 

The only other considerable gang in the city was the ABB, the only gang who could survive a firefight with the Empire. There were others, of course. There were nameless tinkertech mercenaries popping up in Downtown, and Uber and Leet had henchmen, so they technically qualified. The Merchants existed, and Faultline and her mercenaries were counted as well, though they rarely did anything inside the city itself. Rosewood and her girls were down in Bricktown, and you had the individual villains doing shit, too. Hellhound, Circus, _Grue_. But the ABB, they were the only other real _force_. 

What the Empire had in numbers and territory, Lung matched in sheer defensive power. He claimed wherever Brockton’s Asian immigrants lived, and he held it practically by himself. He had fought the Protectorate off on his own when he had arrived in the city, and, as far as I knew, he batted back the Empire whenever they’d made a move into the east Docks. He just couldn’t project that strength, couldn’t take the fight outside his patch. 

I had to pause again as I turned towards SoLo. From here I could run until the turning to Winslow, and from there it wouldn’t take too much to get home. Thinking through my plan helped though, made the running less hard. 

‘A house divided against itself, cannot stand’. Maybe it was _because_ they were the Empire that I kept coming back to that. Dad hated them. He’d lost a friend to the Empire before I was born, and when he was younger, before he’d had the position to keep them out, they’d openly canvassed at the Docks and he’d heard how they preached. The Empire got off on being the persecuted, he said, even while they persecuted. They bought into the idea that their community, their shared vision, was under constant attack by pretty much any _other_ you could point at, from the government to gays. With the exception of parahumans, never parahumans. 

The shared delusion of persecution was their strength, and the reason that they had so many more capes than anyone else in New England. As long as they could all pull together against others, they’d keep going. As long as Lung couldn’t strike out at them, couldn’t have them stand and fight, and they couldn’t overcome him, nothing would ever change. 

The sidewalk was busy so I stepped onto the road, running past the coffee shops, legs pumping as I struggled with the gradual incline that rose up to the Palanquin. The great, big four story club looked like a fortress, hunched over the intersection, thick walls and closed doors. There was trash scattered around the street from the night before. The place to go to get in touch with Fautline’s gang, apparently, and also Peyton, he had told me. A cape hub. I ran on. 

I still believed that my plan was decent, that it could succeed. Frame Hookwolf, point Lung at a hideout while the Empire fought amongst itself, and let God and the Protectorate sort out the mess. Disrupt the status quo and the gangsters would fall, and when they were weakened the police and the PRT could shut them down for good. It wouldn’t solve crime, but it’d solve the biggest gangs in Brockton Bay. Without them, maybe shit would finally start getting better. 

Except I’d almost died. More than once. The Empire knew my costume, and my one attempt at an interrogation had been as wretched an experience as my one attempt at a patrol. Getting the gangs to topple each other was still a worthy goal, but I had to be more sensible about it. I couldn’t look around Empire hotspots in costume. The obvious answer, to go out of costume, made me even more nervous. Day or night, it would only take one incident without a mask on to ruin my life, forever. 

The black SUV stalking down my street played on my mind. 

I knew what I had to do, I just didn’t have the _balls_ to do it. 

At Winslow I ran on the other side of the street. I could’ve gone one road over, not looked over the playing field as I ran past, but I wanted to know, I wanted to see them all there while I was out here. It had been three days since I’d last showed up; no one cared. There were some seniors standing outside the main entrance, with an older guy in a hoodie with the hood pulled up over his head. His blue eyes glanced up at me across the street, then looked away. Skinheads meeting their dealer, of course. _Everybody needs their vice to get through a day at Winslow, no judgement, boys._ Not for that, at least. 

I managed to make it home without any more breaks, stumbling to sit on the rough steps to our door on rubber legs. There was a step, an intermediate step, that seeing the school dealer had reminded me off. Throwing myself against the Empire’s teeth, costumed up, wasn’t the only way to get what I wanted, nor was wandering around the south side without a mask. I had someone who owed me a favour, someone who could probably tell me what I needed to know, and there was no reason to do it all by myself. I’d go to the Palanquin tonight, I’d leave a message and a number for Peyton, and when he got in touch I’d learn what I needed to know.

***** *****

Dad was an obstacle, as always. One easily dealt with.

“I think we’ve got one of your mom’s old migraine sticks in the medicine cabinet, or I can get you some ice?” 

“I’ve had some Tylenol, I just need to sleep.” 

I went to bed at half past eight. With no one around Dad only made it to nine thirty before I heard his footsteps coming up the stairs. I gave it to eleven, anyways, and then I got out of bed and threw on jeans and a jumper. I pulled my hair up, hoping it’d make me look slightly older, and I threw on a thin jacket too. 

I was leaving my umbrella here, and my costume. Dad had bought that I was jogging now, as far as I knew, but his suspicion was just below the topsoil and I didn’t want to water it by creeping downstairs. My sneakers would let me run, and my ring would let me take a hit if I got into danger tonight. 

The streetlight didn’t shine in my window well, and the night sky was dark and uninviting. After a moment I opened my wardrobe and pulled out the drawer. It was worth charging it, even if I wouldn’t use it. I slipped the revolver under my jumper. Cold. 

I walked to the Palanquin. There was sleet in the air, snow that melted before it touched you, designed to sneak through denim and ruin hair. It took twice as long as my run had, but eventually I left the smaller streets of the Docks and heard the deep thump of loud music, getting louder. 

The Palanquin in the daytime was an ugly building, surrounded by trash, dead and exhausted. The Palanquin at night was light and colour. Blue colours moved at random over its brick walls from spotlights I couldn’t see, while green strobes flickered around the entrance. A queue curved around the corner of the intersection, dozens dressed in fancy clothes, women wearing high heels. Even with the music making its way through the soles of my feet, I could hear them screaming. Everyone was so loud, so drunk, and they hadn’t even made it in. 

There was a bouncer at the door, a heavy, young guy with a thick neck and a weird not-at-all-current flat-top haircut. He’d scan the IDs of those trying to get in with a little gadget until it turned green, staring at them with beady eyes. I was separated from the queue by a red velvet rope, and I walked along until I was next to him and caught his attention. 

“I need to leave a message for Peyton?” 

“You got to queue like everyone else, back of the line.” He was scanning someone’s ID, but he glanced at me when he spoke. 

“I just need to leave a message at your reception, or something? I was told I could.” 

“Back of the line.” 

I looked at the queue, at the rate he was letting people in it would take me half an hour to get back here, and I got the sense that he’d be no more help, without an ID to show. 

I looked up. There were windows. Fuck him. I turned to walk around the building, away from the line. 

A big guy, black, and middle aged, in a black tee, and holding a tablet stepped out from the exit. “Jase,” he said, “what’s the hold up?” 

‘Jase’ grunted at me, and the new guy beckoned me over. 

“I need to get in touch with a guy called Peyton, he said I could reach him here. I know that sounds stupid.” 

He looked at me. One eyebrow raised. “Yeah, okay. You want me to get him?” 

I nodded quickly. He was here? It’d been three days since he’d been hospitalised. “Yes, please,” I said. He nodded and marched back inside, and I stepped off onto the sidewalk. 

He came back quickly, leading Peyton behind him. He looked like shit. I’d hidden my bruises with makeup and my power. If I’d hadn’t, no one would have noticed them next to him. The once-villain looked like he had been stung by half a dozen African bees, and one of his eyes was a lurid and shiny black in the lights of the Palanquin’s entrance. 

“Hey!” He ran over to me, made like he was going to wrap me in a hug or maybe he was just attacking me. I grabbed his arm and pulled him away from the security and across the street. 

“Yo,” he said, when I let go. 

“You look really bad, should you be here? Should you be in hospital?” 

He shrugged. “Insurance. Didn’t expect to see you so soon, dude. Felt like shit that we didn’t give you a number before you split.”

I cut through. “Did you mean what you said, then, that you owe me?” I asked. 

“If you’re in trouble, I’m your guy, no doubt.” Even with a half-shut black eye, he was deathly serious. 

This was going to be a sensitive question. He was a white dude with blue eyes, and we weren’t exactly in the most secure location, even with everything that had happened I couldn’t be sure he’d fall on my side. There would definitely be sympathisers in those few people milling on the sidewalk closest to us. I took him by the arm and pulled him further away from them. 

“It’s difficult. I need to find something out, and I don’t think I can do it by myself, but I thought maybe you could. I’m new, and I keep getting in trouble. I don’t know how things work, where the gangs are, who’s who.”

“Who’s who,” he said, “who’s who. I can help with that, definitely. I’ll hook you up no problem, come on.” He pulled out an ID and pushed it into my hand. “Follow my lead,” he said. And he pulled me back to the doors. He shushed me with a whispered ‘ _inside_ ’ when we stepped onto the Palanquin’s sidewalk. We were walking back towards the bouncer that had found him for me. I glanced at the ID in my hand. He was sneaking me inside. I looked up at the spotlights projecting onto cloud cover. There was no way I could sneak into a club at fifteen. But I did kind of want to. 

“Dude, this is Annie, my plus one. She’s on the list.” He was addressing the guy who had gone to fetch him for me. He didn’t look impressed, looking me up and down. I looked so much younger than anyone else here. 

“This is Annie. The Annie you’ve brought here at least four or five times that I’ve seen?” 

“Ahuh.” Peyton pulled the ID from my hand and gave it to him. 

“This is Annie, who is twenty two?” 

“Yeah, man, my plus one.” 

“Who, on the list on my tablet, is already ticked off?” 

Silence. 

“I had to get a phone call from my grandmother,” I said. “She’s sick.” 

“Don’t be a hardass, man. Her grandmother, man,” said Peyton. Jase, the bouncer who had been an ass to me, looked over at us from the main line and scoffed. 

“When’s your birthday, ‘Annie’?” 

I hesitated. Peyton started making fingers behind his back, but without looking right at them I couldn’t figure it out. 

“Every year so far,” I ventured.

He shook his head, gave me back the ID. “I’m sorr–” 

Peyton leaned in close, turning his body to shield me from the party goers. “Dan. Management will want to meet her.” 

He grunted at Peyton and me, tapped on his tablet for a few seconds. After a moment, he directed Jase to a man getting handsy further down the queue. 

“Stay on the second floor.” He stepped aside to let us through. I breathed out as we passed him, stumbling on the step, and the gun slipped underneath my shirt. My heart was beating quickly. There was something so mundane in the danger, so teenage in sneaking into a club, but I felt it all the same. I hadn’t even wanted to come in, not really, I’d dressed this way just in case. 

Inside, there was one halfway well-lit area, a circular room with a desk where people were paying for their entrance. Peyton steered me past, waving at the girl behind the barrier, then through a maze of dark corridors where my sneakers stuck to the floor with each step until we emerged into the main arena. 

It was loud. It was ginormous. There was fog coming from the far end where a stage blasted out light and sound, directed by a DJ behind a turntable as long as a truck. It went bright and dark in instants, showing up dancers like stop-motion animation. Lasers strobed, making it difficult to judge the space around me. I struggled to move my way around the clubbers, who only seemed to want to walk through whichever spot I was standing in. 

“Can we talk outside?” I asked. He held a hand to his ear, said something. “What?!” I shouted. 

He leaned down to speak into my ear. “Wait. Here.” Then he started to leave, pushing off through the crowd towards the walls of the ring. Fuck that. I followed, pushing through the press to stairs that curved upwards along the wall, to the higher floors. 

It was quieter up here, but still as busy. Plush blue seats made out of some faux leather lined the gallery looking out over the floor below. I saw Peyton’s buzzcut pushing through people and into a room that turned off from behind the upstairs bar. A cordon marked it off from the general spaces, and another bouncer stood in front of it with his arms crossed. 

“This is one of our VIP areas, you can’t come in.” He wouldn’t budge. 

I leaned against the corner of the bar where the dirty glasses were piled up and kept an eye on the barrier. The music was loud enough that I couldn’t hear anything, a relentless, thumping bass. Men and women were constantly passing me, walking along the gallery or stumbling up the stairs in high heels. Some of them wore clothes that would’ve made Emma blush, and I felt oddly conservative. Unsettled. I couldn’t wear things like that, not now, and not in six years when I could come with my own ID. Someone dropped a glass, the smash of it cutting through. Bouncer didn’t move to help. 

The bartender tapped me on the shoulder and I jumped. She was young, dressed in a waistcoat and white dress shirt with a tie, with black hair like mine. 

“A beer, please!” I shouted, the first thing that came to mind, and she heard me on the second try. 

“Can I see some ID?” 

Why were they asking again, I’d got in, hadn’t I? I handed over Annie’s ID, scanning it quickly. The bartender looked at it for a minute.

“When were you born?” 

“Eighteenth of September, seventy-nine.”

“You’re thirty-one?” 

“I said eighty-nine,” I shouted. She stared at me, and I squirmed. There were too many people waiting to get served on the long arm of the bar. She handed back the I.D. 

“I’m going to make you something.” Watching her was an experience. She poured bright green and pink liquids together, ice, shook them up. She didn’t do any tricks like spinning or throwing it, but when it came out into a tall glass, a huge glass of orange and pinks, and she added pineapple, it looked impressive enough. 

“You’ll like this. It’s a cocktail, virgin.” 

I gasped. 

“It means no alcohol,” she said. 

“I knew that,” I said. And I did, it just hadn’t been my first thought. 

The bartender frowned. “You came in with Peyton, right?” She had a finger pressed to her ear, then nodded her head over my shoulder. I turned; the bouncer had unlinked the divider and was looking at me. “Go on in,” said the bartender. “Management will speak to you when they’re free.” 

I reached for my pocket. 

“It’s on the house,” she said. I went through. 

This room was cosier. It had seats all the way around, and windows looked out onto Brockton. Two circular tables separated the booths from each other. Peyton was there, and Annie, and a few other people. A man stood up when I stepped in and walked past me, his hand in front of his face so that I couldn’t see him. 

“Yeah, okay, see you whenever. Dick!” shouted Peyton. He was sat on the table in the middle of the room, next to a bucket of bottles on ice. “Ignore him. Okay, so Overshadow meet–”

An older woman stepped forward, silver hair cropped short on the sides, taller than me. She had lines at the corner of her mouth which made it look turned down, even as she smiled at me. Her hand extended. “Edel. A pleasure. You’re one of Sketch’s finds, hey?” 

I shook her hand, and my eyes widened. Edel, a cape name? Blue eyes danced at my surprise. Capes. This was a club lounge for capes? She let go of my hand. “Don’t shake a parahuman’s hand if you don’t know what they can do, consider that my welcome gift.” 

“Er,” I said. Peyton had unmasked me, without even talking to me first. That fuck. But then no one here was wearing masks. 

“Don’t let her get in your head,” said a young woman. She looked about Annie’s age, with long brown hair, and a long face. She was dressed in a summer dress, and she spoke with an accent, something South American. “I’m Thorn,” she said. She didn’t stand to shake my hand, I noticed. 

“Have a seat. You’ve met me,” said Annie, “and this is John, we’re the groupies.” A tall guy with thick glasses waved at me, sipped from a beer bottle. I perched on the end of the booth, unsure of what to say.

My drink was sweet. Really sweet. When I drank it, the taste of it felt almost like a new energy was on the point of building up in me. But no, it was the same two as before, even having shook Edel’s hands. Everything about this was confusing.

***** *****

“So how did you meet Sketch?” asked Thorn, that accent coming through clearly. The music here was loud but not overpowering, tucked away from the DJ’s bank of speakers on the floor below.

“Err, we bumped into each other at Trinity Market,” I said. 

“And then she saved both our asses from the Merchants,” said Annie. 

“Can we not?” said Peyton. “I don’t want to talk Merchants again. Don’t make deals with meth heads, more at ten o’clock.” Annie patted his head.

I looked at the others, Thorn and her guy looked appropriately disturbed by this. Whatever _this_ was, it didn’t feel like a gang vibe, like I was about to be forced into Faultline’s crew. And I’d never heard of Thorn before, or Edel. 

“Come on, I want to dance.” He was up quickly, taking Annie by the hand. This was my opportunity, I had a reason for being here and I didn’t want to discuss it in front of people I didn’t know. 

“Pe– Sketch, can I talk to you?”

“Come dance with us,” said Annie, and she grabbed me by my sleeve, pulling me with her back towards the door. I shook my head, pulled my hand free. She wasn’t dissuaded, pulling at my sleeve, till Peyton made her let me be. He gave me a thumbs up and was gone. Shit. There was too much… extroversion. It was so loud, everyone was so open and fucking expressive. I’d wait here, he’d come back, I’d say what I needed to and go. 

“They’re not going to end well.” It was Edel speaking. Middle-aged, she had boots on, hair cropped close on the sides of her head, and was dressed in denim jeans and a leather jacket over a sequined tee. 

“We love Annie! Don’t be mean,” said Thorn, and she slapped a hand on John’s knee, so he nodded. He didn’t seem to say much. 

“She likes him because he’s a mess.” 

Thorn shook her head, “She likes him because he’s _fun_.” 

Edel took a slug from her beer, put her arm up and over the back of the booth. “I think he’s a dick. I reckon fifty percent of people would say the same, on a good day. What do you think, Overshadow, do you like Sketch?”

I grimaced. They were both looking at me, and I was on the spot. 

“Sit down, have a drink,” said Edel. I perched on the edge again. 

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m not sure. He didn’t make the greatest first impression.” 

“Overshadow,” said Thorn, and I grimaced, again.

“I’m not married to that name,” I said. There was a pause. “So, err, what are your powers?” 

Edel put her boots up on the table. “I make good things bad,” she said, and she winked at Thorn, raised an eyebrow at Thorn’s rolled eyes. “I can blast stuff, change how strong it is. You?” 

I was tempted to be honest, but I’d been stung before. They both smiled a lot, but I couldn’t trust easily anymore. “My power’s not good, it’s new. I break things when I touch them, technology, smartphones. Computers.” 

“I am sorry,” said Thorn. Edel pulled a face. 

“Yeah,” she said. “The first few months can be rough. Things can get better. They _do_ get better.” She shrugged. “You might find there’s more to it than you thought, when you’re less close to your trigger.”

She must have seen something in my face. “Trigger? Boy, you are green. When bad things happen to bad people, if they’re fucked up enough, they get powers.”

“That’s not how it happens,” I said.

“Isn’t it? When you got yours, was it a good day? Sure as shit wasn’t for me, or for Thorn. Shit, we’re going to have to give you the whole orientation! Here, put down your girly drink, you want some real stuff if we’re grabbing the prickly shit.”

She poured a clear liquid into small glasses. When we each had one, she held her glass up. 

“Paludamentum,” they said together. It burned like fire, and then a moment after it had scalded down my throat, I _tasted_ it. It was poison. It was bitter, and sour, and horrible, and I couldn’t help but cough as it burned. Everyone laughed.

A new voice came from behind me. “Don’t trust anything she says. She makes up for her boring not-a-cape life by being difficult when she drinks.”

There was a woman behind me, maybe in her mid-twenties. She had a dazzling necklace on, and blue nail polish the same shade as her form-hugging blue dress, which looked like silk or satin or something else expensive. Her blond hair was plaited over one shoulder, and she smiled at me with perfect white teeth. I instantly disliked her. She held out a hand. 

“Hi,” she said, “I’m Sam.” 

“We’re using our outdoor names,” said Edel, lazily. 

“Ah,” she said, “Sibylline, then.” Seeing I wasn’t going to take her handshake, she pulled back. Thorn gave me a thumbs up from across the table. 

“Hi.” Quietly. She sat down next to me, and I shuffled to make room, squeezing between them. I pulled in on myself. If I relaxed then my shoulder would press against Sam’s bare arm, or my leg touched Edel’s thigh. I looked towards the door. 

“We’re talking about triggers,” said Thorn.

“No, thank you,” said Sam. “Let’s not.” 

I turned my torso sideways, trying to get some breathing room. “But I don’t know any of this, and it’s not online. How am I meant to find out about this stuff when I don’t know anyone?” 

Sam pulled a card out from her clutch. It was embossed with silver lettering, with her name, a number and email. “Email me,” she said, “my office keeps a pack for new capes. These things are out there but they’re disparate, hard to tie together. And most parahumans don’t like to talk about them.” I took the card from her, holding it under the light. Sam Van Hegan. “Hands up girls if you want to talk about the day you triggered.”

Thorn sat on her hands. Edel, very pointedly, did not move. I put the card in my pocket.

“Ok, not that then,” I said. “Is this normal, that capes know each other out of costume?” 

They all cheered, John the loudest of all, and I jumped. Another small glass was put into my hand, and they all drank while I held mine in one hand. 

“We’re not C words,” said Sam. 

Edel booed. “I’m a C word.” 

“And we don’t say that word, or we all have to drink,” Sam carried on. 

“We used to be Rogues,” said Thorn, “but MIRIS said no.” 

“So what are you?” I asked.

They all spoke at once so I couldn’t make out any answer. Edel waved her hands at the other two, telling them to shut up. 

“We’re the halfers. Half in, half out, we got the powers but not the c-words.” 

“I liked the Grey Collar Club. That lasted for almost a year, and was the right amount of boring,” said Sam. 

John’s voice rumbled from the corner, and it was South American, too. “My favourite was the Penny Dreadfuls, but that didn’t last even an hour.” 

“I didn’t think it’d be like this, all the...” I gestured at them, not really sure what I meant, but they seemed to get it. Edel leaned forward, pulling her boots off the table, looking intently at me. 

“Right now, you’re thinking ‘why aren’t these chicks in masks, isn’t that unsafe? Isn’t that reckless’? Parahumans wear masks for the branding, right? Wrong. They wear them so they can kill you and get away with it.”

“Edel–” Sam said. 

“No, she’s new and green, and she thinks it’s all Legend and Professor Haywire, she needs to hear it. Don’t let anyone bullshit you into thinking a mask is worth anything more than the spandex it's made from. The moment a villain or a hero thinks you’re in the way all the talk they talk gets forgot. Thorn, when you got your powers, how many of us told you it was like a game, as long as you didn’t escalate, as long as you followed a code of honour?”

She was slow to reply. “Two, maybe three.” 

“Which one tried to kill you?” 

“Edel!” said Sam. 

“No, it’s different for you, Sam. You signed up to government work right away. Kid, don’t ever believe a villain will follow ‘the rules’”—she made air quotes as she said it—“for a second longer than it suits them. Stay out the game. Don’t buy into the cape shit.” 

John cheered, but he was the only one. I wasn’t sure what to do. What I had taken for an accent I was pretty sure was just her slurring her words. Thorn put a hand on Edel’s knee. Sam put a glass in a hand. 

“Yeah, I said it, didn’t I.” She held up her glass, I still had mine from before. 

“Paludamentum,” they said, without joy. 

“Palliedamunta,” I mumbled, half a second behind. It tasted as bad as before. “What does that mean, anyway?” I had questions, a lot of questions. This was the least dangerous one that I could think of, with Edel’s face like thunder and her power only vaguely described. 

“No idea,” said Edel, “it was Lightstar who started it, back when he still lived here.” She was silent for a moment. “I’m going to go get another bucket for the table.” She stomped out and the tension left with her. 

We got talking then, properly, and I learnt a little more about them. I was still pissed at Peyton for outing me with no warning, but even with Edel’s demeanour, they didn’t seem like bad people. Better people than anyone I went to school with. 

They talked me through the drinks in the ice bucket. Vodka, rum, and a number of beers with weird and ridiculous names. They all had wildly different opinions on what was good but they told me I’d learn to like some of them in time. Pretty obviously, they knew I wasn’t twenty-one but none of them seemed to care. Even Sam.

She was law-enforcement, kind of. I didn’t get it. She worked for the Mediation and Integration of Rogues in Society office, a subdivision of the much more famous government body Watchdog, who kept the Stock Market and the Lottery free from Parahuman manipulation. 

She told me what she did at least twice, and apart from a lot of travel and a lot of paperwork it became no clearer. Her power made her job easy, made the paperwork melt away and the department pay her decent money when they could barely afford staplers, but other than that tidbit she was coy about what she could do. Or I’d forgotten. My alcohol free cocktail was abandoned, off to one side by that point, and my head a little more bubbly. I was laughing a lot, mostly because of John and Thorn. 

Both of them were from Brazil, and Thorn was a member of a dozen environmental causes. She had a wicked sense of humour, and a million stories about pissing off people in suits, and she tweaked Sam’s nose enough that I could believe it. She could make little energy bubbles, she said, that could make effective barricades and she used them in her protests. John was her boyfriend, his name wasn’t some really low-effort pseudonym, he didn’t have powers.

Edel was quieter, on her return, maybe because we weren’t talking about cape stuff. She was long out of the ‘game’ and apparently predated it. She had gotten powers early. Really early. She had been using powers without a costume before the Protectorate, before Behemoth, before all of it. In the 90s she’d put on a costume and took up her name, for a time, and then she’d put it all down again. She was from Providence, but that was about all she was willing to say about her youth, and about having powers when almost no one had known what powers were. 

“So why come here,” I asked. “Why have cape nam—” Cheer, toast, drink. “—why do you meet up?”

“Well, there’s venting,” said Thorn, “talking to other people with powers, when you’re not on the C-word scene or in a C-word team. People without powers can’t get it.” 

“Sorry,” said John. Thorn shushed him. 

“It helps that Faultline lets us all drink for free,” she said. 

Sam answered my question before I could ask it, counting off each reason with a finger. “One, parahumans coming here, being known to come here, draws business. Two, having a group of unknown parahumans discourages trouble from C-words with a grudge against her team, particularly when they’re away. Three, sometimes she needs the right power for a problem, and maybe we’ll help her.” 

“Does that happen often?” I asked. “The last one?” 

“For me, yes.” Sam flicked her braid back over her shoulder. “For you, probably not, and she lets you say no. She’s a villain by PRT decree, she doesn’t see it that way, doesn’t act that way, or I wouldn’t sometimes say yes.” 

“And we get something out of it, too,” said Edel. “We help each other when shit goes south.” She looked at me, deathly serious. Leaned forward. “If you join that game, don’t make the mistake of thinking we’re easy targets.” 

“I wouldn’t–”

“Don’t.” 

This was my problem. This was why it didn’t matter who I met, or how they treated me, why I was still Taylor even as they called me Overshadow. 

I closed in, I watched, I wore muted colours and I looked for the twist, the hook, the lurking barb in everything everyone said. And it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter that I knew that about myself, knew that it’d got so much worse since the bullying. It didn’t matter that this probably wasn’t actually a personal attack, and that I’d see that with an hour to digest it and attack it from different angles, in ten different imagined pairs of shoes. I stood. 

Thorn clapped her hands together, after the silence dragged. “Overshadow, want to hear a joke?” 

It was obvious that while they might be like me, I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t expecting open arms on my first meeting, but Edel’s aggression reminded me too much that they were strangers, that closer people had turned on me for less.

It had to be late by now. There was no clock in here, and the night sky out the windows looked the same as when I’d entered. Street lights haloed in the glass, on empty dark streets. Peyton had been gone forever and I still hadn’t actually done what I had come here to do. I’d been too into pretending I wasn’t a high schooler, and hanging out with people who didn’t care about how they looked or who they hung out with. But they weren’t my friends.

“I need to get going,” I said. I squeezed against the table, trying to get around Sam. She grabbed at my hand as I slipped around her. 

“No. Stay,” she said. 

The energy inside me was unchanged, the two bands overlapping still, resonating and pouring into my things, like they had the entire night. Maybe two energies was my limit. 

I tugged my hand free. “Sorry,” I said, “it’s late.” 

“One last toast,” said Sam, and she was already pouring out drinks. “Come on.” 

I rolled my eyes, but reached down for the shot. I bent over, my tee hanging off my skinny frame. 

The gun slipped free, moved under my shirt, fell out, clattering onto the glass table with a smash. Edel was fast. Something translucent blasted the gun off the table, and then she grabbed my arm firmly, pulling me over the table. 

“What the _fuck_ was that?”

Sam was standing up on the couch, backing away from me, and Thorn had gone for the gun. 

“Why the _fuck_ did you bring a gun here,” Edel snarled.

“I wasn’t going to use it,” I said, still pulled over the glass table so that I was looking at the hardwood floor. “It’s for safety.”

She let go. I staggered backwards. Thorn backed away from me, the gun clasped between two palms and pointed at the ground. 

“Can I—can I have it back?” 

Thorn looked to Edel, Edel scowled. What she was going to say I never found out. The bouncer from beyond the doorway stepped through, his walkie talkie crackling. He looked at us, saw the gun, his eyes widening. “On the ground, drop it!” A pistol came out from somewhere, barrel trained on Thorn, his feet set wide in a stance. “Drop it!” he shouted. 

Thorn did as he asked, kicking it across the floor to him. My eyes followed it as it _skrchhed_ past me, to the security’s waiting boot. 

“I can explain,” I said. His beady eyes were looking between me, Edel, Thorn, locking longest onto tall John, half-stood, in the corner. It was annoying. _We’re the ones with powers, we’re the dangerous ones, not him._

After a moment longer, his own gun went back into a hidden holster on his back, tucked out of sight beneath his back. Definitely not legal. Mine he kept on hand. 

“You’re goddamn right you can,” he said. He paused, pressed a button on the walkie talkie at his waist as the crackling cut out. “Management are ready for you.”

***** *****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Emptive Worm quotes that I suspect may be relevant at this point: 
> 
> quote Shell 4.3  
> (Tattletale doing her exposition thing)  
> “...or why third world countries have the highest densities of peoples with powers. Not capes, but a lot of people with powers.”
> 
> Speck 30.4  
> Capes in hiding. Rogues. Deserters who had fled for safety in our hour of need. A surprising number of capes who had no costume, and who had barely used their powers at all, judging by the way it felt when I reached for their abilities. They were rogues who'd been subtle at best, or rogues who'd gone without powers altogether


	13. 2.4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thanks to Fitz and Niez for the high concept, thanks to Juff, JoesAlot, and Distraktion for the nitty gritty.

**2.4**

***** *****

The White Mountains dominated the western half of New Hampshire, while the eastern half sunk down to join the sea. Upstate, only Brockton Bay could really boast being both on the range and the coast, the fingers of the mountains reaching down to the city. Captain’s Hill was the most grand, though the entire west of the city was speckled with smaller rises. A foothill named for the officer who had led the British raid that had captured the defensible bay from the Abenaki, hundreds of years ago, before Parahumans were a thing. To me, cutlasses, ships, and battles without powers seemed the more fantastical scene, the more unrealistic.

The colonists had built a fort on Captain’s Hill, looking over the Atlantic, and then for a time the city had faltered, the people had barely come, and it had looked like Brockton Bay would be one of many small New England towns north of Boston, with a thousand families and a Main Street, and no building taller than a church spire. 

Fashion had struck. The famous quarry had opened; rose stone and White Mountain brick dug out and found to compliment London Regency facades. Miners had rushed in and stone had shipped out, then the port had grown to be the biggest on the east coast, north of New York. For a time. 

The Palanquin was built atop the gradual incline to one of the smaller hills, and from Faultline’s office the mercenary villain commanded an arresting view of the city and the ocean. 

Or she would have, if she were here. 

The cape tapping away on a Macbook in front of me was running the club in her absence, sitting behind an intimidatingly expensive walnut desk, her gas mask rattling with every breath. She was dressed in a red and black costume, made of the sort of stuff they made firemen’s uniforms from. The security guard, Pierce, stood in the corner. My gun was on the desk, an inch from Spitfire’s fingers. The barrel pointed somewhat vaguely in my direction. 

“Okay. I’m locked out.” She smashed a fist on the keyboard and I jumped, then she started opening drawers, pulling out paper and pencils. “We’re going to have to do this old school.” 

I couldn’t place her voice, it was too distorted by her mask. “Do what exactly? I didn’t come here looking to hire Faultline’s crew,” I said. 

“Take a seat, won’t you?” Suddenly oddly formal, like she was affecting an accent, like she was meeting the governor. I’d heard that Faultline’s outfit was a professional group of cape mercenaries, but so far the only cape I’d met today was appearing as uncertain as I was. She kept reaching under her mask to rub her eyes, and she’d yawned when I’d been escorted in. Spitfire was smaller than me, and I had a suspicion that if she wasn’t a cape she wouldn’t have been old enough to enter the Palanquin either. 

“Overshadow,” she said, “we’re going to have to talk about the gun.”

“It’s for safety,” I said. I had to get some packing tape. Something to secure it if I had to carry it out of costume again, when she gave it back. _If_ she gave it back. “Brockton at night isn’t always the safest place to be, and my power isn’t great if someone pulls a gun on me.” 

“No guns, no powers,” she said. “Please don’t let this happen again, and check your guns at the door in the future.” 

“I can come back?” 

She smoothed out the creases on the paper, and set her pencil to it. “That depends,” she said. “What should I call you, firstly. Is Overshadow your usual name?” 

“Overshadow was spur of the moment, names are hard. I haven’t found anything that feels ‘right’ yet.” 

“Good luck with that,” she mumbled. “I’ll put Overshadow down for now.” 

There was another, something that kept finding its way to the top of my lists. “How about Redoubtable?” 

“I’m going to put Overshadow down.” 

She scribbled more than one word down on the paper. The office was cosy. A long, rectangular room, with one expensive desk as a contrast to a cheap metal waste paper basket, the stone walls were chipped and wet with condensation. I could just make out the curve of the light-up golden P that spelt Palanquin poking up outside the bottom of the window. 

“Roughly, what are your powers and how long have you had them?” 

“Do I have to tell you this?” 

“No, but it can bring some money your way, if it’s the sort of thing that we can use and you’re happy to do it.” 

I was sitting on a wooden seat that creaked loudly as my weight shifted. “I didn’t come here to meet Faultline, and I’m not sure I want to be on call for a villain.” 

“And you’re not interested in a little extra cash?” 

I thought of the millions under my basement floor. “Not really.” 

She put her pencil down. “Very well. We don’t allow capes into the club without knowing their power, same way we’d ask you to check your gun at the door, but I’m not the boss. Come back some time if you want to negotiate.” She stretched, yawned. “Thanks for waking me up at 2am for this.”

“You don’t sleep here,” I said. Even on the third floor, the volume was more felt than heard.

“Pierce, show her out, give her her gun at the door.” 

I stood. It had turned out better than I expected, and worse than I hoped. “Where is Faultline?” I asked. 

“On a job.” 

“How come she left you here?” Spitfire put the paper into her drawer, pointedly ignoring me. Pierce grabbed my arm. “If I wanted to get in touch with her when she’s back, how do I do that?” 

“Come back any time, if you’re willing to share. Or else you can contact the boss on the lists.” 

“The lists?” 

“You’ve heard of the Whitelist, right? The Blacklist is the same, but for not-heroes.” 

“Ah,” I said. The former was familiar. The Whitelist was the yellow pages for small time superheroes. Sure, there were some big corporate teams and independents on there for the publicity who were hired by cities or major corporations. Mostly it was for the smaller scale. The place you turned to if you needed a problem solved, you were willing to empty your savings to do it, and the police couldn’t get it done for you. The Whitelist had never done well in Brockton, but with the advent of smartphones and apps it was taking off across a lot of the west and east coast. It was probably only a matter of time before New Wave and other local heroes started trying it again. 

The Blacklist, however? The Blacklist was new to me. 

“We ask you to make an account on either, so we can contact you or vice versa if you want to visit again. Making a page asks pretty much the same questions I was going to ask you.” 

I hesitated. 

“Come back whenever.” She stretched again, got up from her chair. “For now, kindly…” She fired finger guns at the door. Pierce picked up my gun and followed me from the room. 

We were on the third story. A long staircase dropped steeply downward, two corridors came off at the second floor, then there was a gallery to the left and right on the first floor. Smaller and straighter than the curved one I’d climbed up before, this one was empty, and directly above the DJ’s soundsystem. At the bottom of the steps, a separate security guard pulled back a divider and I stepped out onto the dancefloor. Peyton and Annie were there. 

Security got between us, an arm blocking them off from me. 

“Follow me outside?” I asked. 

They did so, while Pierce took me to the front door. He marched me a little off from the exit door, beyond the drunks that were stumbling on and off the sidewalk, negotiating loudly with a taxi driver. 

“Here.” He gave me my gun back surreptitiously, and I stuffed it under my jumper again, securing it more firmly. Peyton and Annie caught it though. 

“Ah, shit, man. No guns in the Palanquin.” He ran one hand over his short hair. 

“It’s not a big deal,” I said, “I’m too young to drink, I don’t care. I need your help.” 

Annie shivered, linking one arm through Peyton’s. They were both so much older than I was. So different. She wrapped her jacket tightly around her scandalous dress, danced her feet against the cold, but she was leaning forward. She was listening to me. 

“I get it,” I said, “I get that you’re not about masks, and villains, and fighting. I didn’t know that parahumans like you existed, but I get it.” 

I took a deep breath. “But I’m not like you. I want to be a cape, a real hero.” 

Peyton interrupted. “Shit’s way dangerous, Overshadow. Like, so dangerous. My uncle out New York way was a cape, lived hard. It didn’t go so well for him.” 

One of my shoes looked a little stained. I’d spilled something on it inside, somehow. My power would fix it, would make it better than it was now, one day at a time. 

“I need to find out where the Empire do their thing. Gang parties and hideouts. I need to know where their capes meet.” 

He sucked in air through his teeth, but it was Annie who spoke. “I can get that for you,” she said. “There are Empire guys at Wiggles all the time. Let me give you my number.” My cape phone was in my back pocket, and she tapped her number in quickly, then sent herself a message. Her cell chirruped in her bag. “Give me a couple of days, and I’ll have something for you.” 

I breathed out. “Thank you, Annie.” 

She smiled at me. She was as pale as I was, and her hair as black as mine, but I couldn’t imagine myself smiling at anyone as openly as she smiled at me then. 

“Okay,” I said, “thanks. I’ll wait to hear from you.” How did you say goodbye to vague acquaintances you were asking to spy on a violent gang. Kind regards? 

“I best get to work,” said Annie. 

Peyton turned with her. “I’ll walk you.” Annie rolled her eyes at him, but he didn’t see. “We’ll see you around, yeah?” 

I nodded. I couldn’t think of any reason not to, even with my disastrous first experience of underage drinking. I watched them walk away for a little while, further into Downtown, down the hill from the Palanquin. 

A taxi took me to the street parallel to home. My sneakers carried me over the garden fences, and up my wall into the bedroom. I wasn't as quiet as I would like. I felt completely like myself, except my face was someone else's, and my tongue a little slow in my mouth. When I lay down, the ceiling spun in three-quarter circles, and my ears could still hear an echo of the music of the nightclub. 

I lay there for a while, thinking about the not-capes, about the Empire, about the drinks. My phone buzzed against my side. Its little almost-obsolete LCD crystal screen lit up. 

_Empire dogfight 2nite. 137 Aldrich Rd. Big place opposite Urban forestry center - A._

I read it twice. With a grunt, I pulled myself up off the bed, and headed down to the basement.

***** *****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: 
> 
> The second part of this chapter took me too long, but next chapter we reach the start of the Act 1 sequence closer. This is what I’ve been waiting to write. Wards shit, Dauntless shit, ABB shit, action, adventure, secrets and of course, a bag full of dollars. Finally.
> 
> I forgot to do it last time. Here’s my rec for the week. 
> 
> You probably have already looked at it, as it’s much more substantial than this fic, but:
> 
> From Hated to Hero by Distraktion is a trump fic starring Greg. It reads like they’ve not read a Greg fic before, which is great, because it feels like a fresh take, a different direction. If you like Gamer Greg, then a palette cleanser of not-game Greg and his character being handled sensitively and deeply may be a nice change of pace. If you don’t like gamer greg, then fear not, and click freely.


	14. 2.5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter replaces the second scene of 2.4 which has now been removed, due to plot hole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thanks Fitz, Juff, Distraktion.  
> (Also, I’m going to go back and change it, but for the purpose of this new scene, Spitfire kept Taylor’s gun in the last chapter. She didn’t give it back.)

**2.4c** :

***** *****

I watched them from behind the branches.

The urban forestry center was a teardrop-shaped park in the west of the city. The southern corner of the park was bounded by a high brick wall, so I had climbed a tree. Under the light of the full moon I could see my target. It was a two story building, wide and expansive, with an ornate rockery on either side of a broad drive. My house could have fit into it four times over. The drive was crowded with cars, maybe twenty or thirty of them, parked tightly together. 

My fingers were cold. It had to be almost 5 _a.m._ and the sun wouldn’t rise for hours. I wasn't certain whether I had found what I was looking for – a hard target. Something the Empire would defend, that their capes would fight for. There were a couple of security guards on the yard, but this was a _very_ nice part of the city and when the city was Brockton Bay it could just be good sense. 

I waited, fighting shivers, while time slipped by like molasses. Having the address was something, and seeing the security, but I could spare another hour to see who was inside. I wasn’t planning to do anything stupid, but then, I never really did plan to. If I didn’t get anything useful this time, then next time I’d try a different vantage point. _Then_ maybe I’d try and break in if I still hadn’t found what I needed. 

The exodus began slowly. First, one guy, then twenty minutes later, another two, scurrying to their cars. I frowned. The tiny binoculars that I kept in my belt showed them to be unremarkable people, driving unremarkable cars. Definitely not the sort you’d expect to see in a neighbourhood like this. One of them wasn’t even a skinhead, a balding man dressed in the type of suit that sold insurance from door to door. Then there was a sudden swell in volume, too-loud voices in the still, pre-dawn air, and two dozen of them burst through the doors and into sight, smoking, shouting, feet crunching over gravel, joking, and arguing. All this punctuated by the slam of driver-side doors as they said their goodbyes. 

It pissed me off that even these people had warmer friendships than I did. That they could drink and not end up pulling a gun on new acquaintances. I rubbed my hands together, puffed hot air onto my fingertips. 

After the Empire-adjacent folk had left, I didn’t have to wait long. A man in a tie and blue slacks held the doors open for two skinheads. 

The Nazis loaded crates into a white panel van – beer bottles, from the colour. They went back into the house, and a moment later they were back, carrying a large cage together. The barking clued me in. Dog-fighting.

This didn’t look like the place for it, but then, I supposed that was probably why it was happening here. It wasn’t the sort of barbaric sport that the Empire could build a stadium for, that they could rent out a warehouse for, with long queues and a name list. A big building like this probably had a big basement. 

My heart froze when I saw him. Even though I’d hoped to, even though I’d thought there’d been only a miniscule chance of it. He was shirtless, his long, blonde hair lank, hanging over his shoulders. Through my binoculars I could see the detail of his metal mask, the wolf visage catching the light like it had the night he’d killed the ABB gang member. 

I took a deep breath. The wind was going against me, away from him. Even if he could smell me, which I wasn’t certain he could, I should be safe. Hookwolf shook hands with the suited man at the door. It was interesting. A high-profile Empire supporter was presumably rare, I doubted many CEO types would be willing to associate themselves with an overtly racist movement. It was another angle, a way to hurt their patronage with something as simple as a whisper to the right ear, but it wasn’t what I wanted right now. A dog-fighting venue wasn’t valuable enough.

Hookwolf clapped the suited man on the shoulder and stepped to one side.

Swaggering out after him was a similarly shirtless cape – Stormtiger. He wore loose-fitting pants tucked into combat boots with chains wrapped around them, and his metallic mask of a tiger was a pale cadet blue with stripes of white. Sick fuck. Like a hoverfly, his tiger motif was _just_ similar enough to make an onlooker think of a more famous and more dangerous killer, a tiger-striped S-class villain that had plagued North America for a decade.

This wasn’t good. My plan had been built on the idea that Hookwolf would be on the outs. I had been shot over it, but he was still here, drinking and dog-fighting. 

I watched the capes closely through the binoculars. Stormtiger pointed at a van, Hookwolf flipped him off, and Stormtiger laughed. Normal male behaviour? Or was Stormtiger Hookwolf’s keeper, his minder while they investigated, keeping things secret from the wider Empire? I tapped my fingers against the branch I was holding. The villains stomped across the gravel to the van that the beers had gone into, and Stormtiger opened the back door, closing it after Hookwolf climbed in. I saw him give the handle a pull, checking it was locked. But then, a van couldn’t hold Hookwolf if he didn’t want to be held. 

This was maddening. Which was it? Was everything down the drain or not?

Stormtiger climbed into the cab of the van, while his henchmen climbed into the one carrying the dogs. The roar of the engines started up, and I watched them peel out onto the drive, towards me. If they turned right, that would be easy. That was the way to the city – rooftops and narrow streets, the sort of terrain that would let me follow them without being observed. If they turned left… 

They turned left. 

I must have still been drunk. I dropped, feet landing on the uneven ground, silent in my shadowy form. It had been a week since my frantic escape from the bikers, and my power improved fractionally every day. Now that I _pushed_ myself I could see the difference. I was out of the park in a moment, in line with the back of the second van, hopefully out of sight. 

There was almost no pause now. I surged towards the van like water, till I could reach out and touch the bumper. I pushed down on the cold, shadowy pitch, the volume of the other energy swelling up. A dive and the tip of my umbrella stabbed into the rear wheel, all my weight behind the spike, and the turning tire almost took my arm off. The puncture had them swerving, but I had already swapped my power and fled. I flitted into the park, hoping they wouldn’t see movement in their mirrors. Their brakes screeched behind me, and my heart drummed a tattoo. 

I could feel the sweat under my balaclava, making the fabric damp, and my shoulder hurt, though not as much as it should have. Definitely still drunk. I rolled my shoulder, popped my head just slightly over the wall. They had jumped up onto the curb and the dogs were barking, loudly. Good. They wouldn’t want the attention. 

I grabbed my phone, ducking down again, and tapped in the number I’d learned. 

“Hi. Yeah. Yeah … it’s Overshadow. I can do that… It’s kind of the same as before. I’ll meet you at the corner of Aldrich and Sewall. Yeah that’s fine.” I put the phone away. 

Over the wall, one skinhead was inspecting the damage while the other was in the back of the van struggling with a large jack. More importantly, Stormtiger hadn’t stopped. The red of his rear lights was heading out of the city. I rolled my shoulder again, rubbing it through my costume. It really ached. 

I ran down the wall until I found the entrance onto Sewall Street. I wasn’t left waiting long. Glen’s taxi appeared from the far corner, and I flagged him over before he reached the corner. 

The window slid down when I tapped on it. “Thanks for coming.” 

“You pay well.” He coughed. “–and upfront.”

I rolled my eyes but reached for my rearmost belt pouch, where I kept my money, and threw him a few hundreds. He didn’t waste time counting it, folding it and putting it into his pocket.

“There’s a van around the corner,” I said, “changing a tire. It’s going to head out of the city, and we’re going to follow them.”

“You’ve got a lot of runaway family.” 

“Har, har,” I said. I stepped back to the corner. They were about done. Through my binoculars, I saw them set the van down from the jack. They closed the doors, climbed back into the cab, and the lights came to life. I watched them roll out. 

I jumped into the back seat of Glen’s cab, the door closing with a click, and we set off in pursuit. “Don’t get too close,” I said, as we swung around the corner. 

“Good tip.”

I bit my tongue from there.

***** *****

It was that deep, dark portion of the night, and as we headed out of Brockton the streetlights disappeared. Delirious, all my depth perception vanished, except within the cone of light that showed street markings zipping by. My sense of time disappeared beyond that same border. What couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes felt like hours. We climbed one of the hills outside the city, behind Captain’s Hill. It had a name, but I couldn’t remember it. Woodland appeared, tall conifers that bordered the roads.

“They’ve turned off.” Glen’s voice pulled me from my reverie. Even with the lenses of my costume I hadn’t really been able to see the van, all of the time. There was a small break in the trees ahead, a turning to our right and a thin dirt track. I saw the flash of a metal gate as we drove past. 

“They turned in there?” I saw his nod. “Stop.” 

He shook his head. “Places like this have cameras on the front entrance. We drive on till we see the edge.” 

The edge was clear. Further on, the thickly packed trees that lined the road became disorderly and wild again. We slowed slowly. Rolled to a stop. 

“What now?” asked Glen. 

It was a good question. I tapped my pouches, lifted my umbrella off the back seat. “I’m going to go and have a look around. I won’t be long, if I’m not back in an hour…” Then what? “I’ll be back before that,” I said. 

Glen spun around, hand grabbing the headrest of the passenger seat to turn. He was older than I had realised, greyer. “Ring, if you're trapped and can’t get out. I’ll call the cops if you can’t talk.” 

I nodded, opening the door and climbing out. “You’ll need to call the PRT too. Hookwolf and Stormtiger are here,” I said. I closed the door on his muttered ‘ _fuck_ ’. 

It was cold. All around me, I could feel the lack of the city. The _air_ smelled different. Crossing the street quickly, I pushed through the branches, into the dark, pine needles crushing under my feet. 

There was a chain link fence, hidden. The top had barbs coiled all along it to stop me from climbing over. Not a problem, I had Dad’s wire cutters in my belt now. Like the microwave, a lot of our cutlery, and most of the furniture in the den, it had been one of the things I’d used my power on before I’d really understood what it was that it did. And how long it took to do it. A couple of hours charge meant the wire cutter worked just a little bit better than it should have. Still, the effort was enough to make my shoulder twinge as I snipped through the links.

The other side was clear of trees. Grass blades crunched under my sneakers, and I crouched down and touched the ground. Frost. Was it that cold? _Alcohol can make you feel warm when you’re cold, Taylor_. Was I that drunk? I didn’t feel it. 

A break in the cloud cover showed the grassy rise, climbing up to squat buildings closer to the top of the hill. Not far from me, there was a water tower; it would make a good vantage point. I looked at it closely, but in this light, from this angle, it was impossible to rule out cameras. 

I dashed to the foot of a ladder, and climbed up the cold iron to the gantry, hiding myself behind the body of the water tank as much as possible. My binoculars showed me what I wanted to see. 

The centre of the compound was dominated by a huge building and the Empire vans had come to a rest next to it. A massive shed made of corrugated metal, it was open to the air and dark inside. From here, I could hear the barking, and I could see the Empire henchmen.

They were unloading the dog cages into the kennel under the van’s lights. I spotted cameras on the buildings, pointed at the tracks, and tall floodlights beyond the buildings, all mercifully dark. The skinheads headed to the longhouse at the top of the rise, and everything went quiet. I counted to three hundred before I rose from where I crouched. 

The binoculars got tucked away, the velcro fastenings closing tightly, and I jumped down, umbrella open. Full speed, I flitted up the hill, until I was behind the nearest building, hidden from the cameras. 

My heart was beating quickly, and my umbrella kept knocking against my knee from where it was held in my belt loop. I was missing my gun, missing the reassurance of having a final option, something I could hide more easily than my umbrella. None of my weapons would be any use against Hookwolf, but maybe a gun would have, if I was fast.

The longhouse had a light on, and as I watched it disappeared, the windows all black. Even though it was cold, I was sweating. I could feel it on my palms. There was a prefab cabin raised above the ground on stumpy legs closer to me. It’d be a good place to look first, and give them more time to fall asleep. This was so reckless, so dangerous. I didn’t feel _here_. Didn’t feel like it was me making these choices, walking in these shoes.

At the back of the long modular, I put my feet in the lattice of its support and climbed up so that I could see through the window. The first showed a couple of desks, with a couple of computers, the light of the standbys enough to see the shape of the room. It took up most of the building, but there was a door in the far corner that led into another room. I shuffled along. The other window was less helpful – completely dark. I fished out my penlight, giving it a shake when it flickered. 

A face in the window. I bit down my scream. A Venetian mask. It was my own reflection. The light was too close and too bright to show me the inside. I put the light back in my belt. I tried the window, pushing my fingers under the cold metal edge and wiggled it. Locked tight. Some deep breaths helped, the rapid drumming of my heart settling now. 

How to get inside? This was their office space, whatever it was that a dog-fighting kennel needed an office for. _Please be here_. The kennel, and the dogs themselves, weren’t the sort of thing that the whole Empire would turn up to defend. If there was anything else worth defending for the gang it’d be found here, or in the longhouse. _I don’t want to break into the longhouse._

The windows opened outward, with the hinges at the top. I swapped bands and my ring felt the prickling, that sense that told me there was metal that I could use. Two firm pinches to each hinge, and the window was free. My fingertips against the glass held it steady and let it fall outward quietly. I held it precariously under one arm as I climbed down and laid it against the grass. Climbing through, I swapped back to shadow and dropped noiselessly into the office. Hookwolf’s office. There was a picture of him on the wall. Shirtless, maskless, it was definitely him — he was holding a belt above his head inside a ring. 

I pulled the penlight out. The office had a desk that was littered with books and papers, and a single computer, with the keyboard set atop the monitor. It was made of metal and it had some cheap under-desk drawers on the right side which were locked tight. The rest of the office was sparse, with a synthetic carpet that bristled like a toilet brush. A metal shelf had some folders on it, most of them empty. The next room had little except desks, computers, and cheap roller chairs. I was careful to keep the light off, as the windows here faced the long house. I tried the computers, with the monitor brightness turned all the way down, but they were password protected.

In the smaller, back room, I looked through the papers. There were lots of receipts, loose notes, and technical and legal documents filled the folders. Changing my power’s pitch, the locked drawers were quickly opened. I deformed the edge of the drawer until I could slip one finger around the lock and bend it out of its socket. 

Jackpot. There were notebooks here, and scraps of papers were stuck in between the pages. It was hard to read under the dim yellow of my penlight. The contents were written in dense block capitals that I mistook for cyrillic letters, then a cypher, but was actually just terrible handwriting. The loose papers were written in a mix of that handwriting and others, and were easier to read. They were undated mostly, but one caught my eye: _‘Dennis unable to store, 5lb coke, 500 tab, move by 11/28’_ then that blocky handwriting underneath had scribbled an address. 

I wasn’t sure if that was where it was coming from or going to, but it worked for me. There was another loose paper that identified a safehouse not far from the Commercial district that held illegal guns, and there was an account number and sort code for a bank that they used to pay vet bills for the dogs. I snapped the book shut and slipped it under my costume, securing it between my belt and my hip. The bullet wound there was close to painless, but the cold leather cover felt good.

The kennels likely weren’t the sort of place that the whole roster of Empire villains would turn up to defend, but what I’d found in the book in two minutes of inspection convinced me I’d have something that _was_ once I could read it properly. 

All was quiet at the window, so I climbed through again. Careful balancing of the window saw it precariously leaning against its frame. They would know that someone had broken in the moment they entered the office, but at least this way they wouldn’t notice it the moment they left the longhouse. 

Outside, I looked up toward the longhouse again. The lights were still out. I had clues to places that might work better for me now, but that didn’t mean that this could be left to fester. Dog-fighting was a horrible blood sport and one Brockton Bay could live without. I’d have to turn this site in to the police or the PRT next week — whenever the ABB had started a war on whichever front I ended up choosing — I had to know whether they needed Protectorate support. 

The wind was coming down from the hill, through the compound and onward to the road I’d left Glen on. Going a little wide to make sure no camera would see me, I snuck to the corner of the longhouse and made my way behind the building. 

It was all rough timber, twice as long as their office, with gables styled to look Nordic at either end of the roof. It was a single story — or, at least, it looked single story at first glance. There were small windows just above the ground, at the far end. A basement? 

I was careful not to use my light. The first two windows had curtains, so I saw nothing, two windows showed a lounge. Couches to seat ten people, a kitchen, and some bean bags were clear in the moonlight. No people though. 

I crouched down to the windows of the basement. It was dark, and I had to hunch over my knees so that I could get my face level with it. The moonlight struck the glass for a second. A face. It wasn’t my reflection. She slapped against the window pane, wild eyed, and my feet tangled under me. I fell with a shout, rolling and jumping back. 

She was ghoulish, whiter than snow — all brow and cheekbones, with pale eyes and pale hair. She hit the glass again. Her face… she wasn’t angry. She was begging. I put a finger to where my lips would be, snuck forward, and she stopped hitting the window. 

She looked European. Scandinavian. Her voice came through the window — muffled but undeniably foreign, in accent and language. She shrunk back when I shone my penlight at her, her pupils shrinking to pinholes suddenly. She looked thin, her hair was unkempt and her forehead and jaw had cuts and scrapes, all on the right side of her face. 

“I can’t understand you,” I whispered, moving my mouth exaggeratedly under my mask, which of course was no use. She slapped a palm against the window again, her face screwed up in anguish. 

“Shut up, shut up!” I held a finger up to my mask. The international shush. Surely. She sobbed dry sobs, covering her mouth. What had they done to her? My chest clenched. I made more little shushing gestures, put a hand to the glass. She pointed at the next window along. I moved. 

There was another face there, one woken up by the noise. He was a black man, young, maybe not even twenty. He looked at me, eyes wide. 

‘Help me.’ The words didn't make it through the bottle bottom glass, but I knew what he was saying, I could see it in his eyes. 

Prisoners. I had to get them out, this was evil. Even as I thought it, light flicked on in both windows. Someone was coming. The guy dived onto his cot. At the other window, the woman had curled up in the corner. 

I felt more than I heard the door to the longhouse open. Footsteps on the wooden deck, the creaking of the stairs. I turned and dashed back, sneakers working overtime, sliding on the grass between the surges. I stumbled on the last one, turned it into a dive, under the supports of the office downhill. Just in time. The flood lights came on. 

He was on the roof. Not in his usual costume — gone was the mask, and he had a t-shirt now and pants without the wrapped chains. Stormtiger. I shimmied back, further underneath, barely daring to breathe. 

He was turning in each direction, and moving his hand in circles underneath his face, like a chef analysing the progress of a simmering sauce. Oh no. 

Slow steps, his boots loud on the wood of the longhouse’s roof, and then the crunch as he landed, I could hear him sniffing now. He was making his way forward and back. Swinging less. Getting straighter. He turned to face the office. 

I held my breath. My heartbeat was traitorously loud in my chest, and my hand tightened on the corner of my umbrella. My one good shot. If I had my gun… 

“HERE!” From over by the kennels. I heard the crash of metal, then again. It was the ladder — they’d found where I’d pulled the metal away from the stairs. 

Stormtiger’s feet were gone in an instant — a step, then a leap and he disappeared, and I felt something disappear with him. A heaviness in the air, a pressure, near to making my ears pop. 

My forehead rested gently against the ground. I could hear footsteps elsewhere and my breath was ragged, uncoordinated panting like I was fresh born from the womb. I was so lucky. They’d only left because I’d not put the sheet metal back into place once I was on the ladder, and I would have, if I’d been able. I’d been an inch from dying. A sniff away. 

My hands had been as steady as a surgeon’s while it was just me and the night, but now I was shaking, I couldn’t stop it. 

Adrenaline impaired hands pulled me under a stilt on the side furthest from the kennel, and I half-rolled onto my back, looking up at a floodlight, blinking away the glare. There was no one nearby, for now, but it was blindingly obvious that Stormtiger could track me. 

The door to the longhouse was open, I could see it from here. It was open, and there were prisoners inside. I took a step towards it before I realised what I was doing. The dogs were barking _. All_ of them were barking. I darted back behind the corner again. It was him, Hookwolf, coming out of the cabins. 

I’d die. If I tried to save them now, I’d die. _I’m sorry_. I ran to the edge of the compound as quickly as I could, keeping the office between myself and where I’d last seen Hookwolf. The wind was whipping past my ears. If they spotted me, I didn’t hear any sign of it. 

As I crossed the ground in sprints, it became darker again. The floodlights weren’t aimed out this way, and there was a gap between the lights of the compound and the lights that illuminated the strip of bare ground immediately next to the fence. . 

Finding my way out wasn’t tricky. The water tower wasn’t far off my angle, and I crept from its shadow to the hole I had cut, pushed the fence open quietly and climbed through. 

From the darkness of the trees, I looked back at the Empire’s prison. A black American, and a white European. Whatever they were being held for it wasn’t the sort of thing that was going to end well. 

I stayed there for a few minutes longer, controlling my breathing, my heart slowly taking its cue and slowing too. The lights stayed on, the barking remained constant, but no one followed me down hill, and I saw no sign of Hookwolf or Stormtiger. And I made sure to look _up_. 

Glen was a mile down the street, and it took me a minute or two to reach him. I tapped on his window and he let me in. 

“Find what you were looking for?”

“Worse.” 

When we passed the track to the compound, I ducked down, keeping only my eyes above the door. There was light from behind the trees. They were still looking for me. 

We drove to where Glen had dropped me off last time. All the way there I chewed at my lip and ground my teeth. Those people needed saving, and the ABB weren’t the way to do it. It was the hardest of hard targets, and I couldn’t use it. Fuck. 

I had run from Battery, and I doubted Dauntless was less inclined to consider me a villain now than when I had first met him. 

No to the ABB, no to the Protectorate. What was I going to do?

***** *****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What have I been enjoying this week? Hmm, I read all of Celestial Forge, but I’m late to that party, for sure, so any of you that would like it have already read it ahead of me. 
> 
> I’ve been reading Two Steps Forward, One Step Back by Fantastical Contrarian which is a little older, it takes a canon Taylor divergence early, but plays it straight. It’s pretty dark at opener, but it didn’t put me off and I enjoyed it. It takes the ‘Taylor was suicidal’ to a conscious conclusion if Tattletale hadn’t met her and intervened. 
> 
> Summary: In a Worm AU, Taylor has a very different first night out. She faces Oni Lee, doesn't meet the Undersiders, and does encounter the heroes. In the short term, this makes things worse, but she soon finds herself with a chance to pull out of the downward spiral her life is in. It will take work. It will not be smooth going, or easy. But she will have a chance to get better.


	15. 2.6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** So talking to a friend recently about the story, and the negative responses in some recently, I was wondering: is it apparent to you that the story is going for some Western tropes? 
> 
> Opening with the ‘evil opposite’ committing a crime; taking a ton of money after two rival gangs fight; getting in a fight in a gang saloon; riding a bucking ‘car’ away from a fight; ; meeting local loosely aligned renegades in a bar; slinging an umbrella from the hip, etc. Was/is it apparent? I’m wondering if my two drives for writing this are in conflict, and maybe that’s one of the underlying explanations for why Taylor is so unsympathetic for the readers. 
> 
> As always, thanks to everyone who helped proofread and idea bounce for this.

**2.6**

***** *****

Glen drove away from me quickly, and I found myself pausing at the beginning of the long street that led to my house.

It was a little before 6 a.m. and, in November, that meant that there was only the faintest hint of a gray pre-dawn light on the horizon.

There were people imprisoned by the Empire, miles out from the city, next to a kennel full of abused dogs that they were training to be cruel. There were two I'd seen, a black man, and a white woman, but there could be many more. My mind jumped to dark places. 

Gang recruiters at Winslow, when they wanted you, were your best friend until they were your only friend. How much harder must a gang play outside a school yard. What sort of things did they do to tie you to them, to have dirt on you, and make you part of the club?

What sort of things to tie a cape to them? Were they crimes that you had to prepare for, collect for? Were they crimes that a cape accused of betraying the group would revel in, would use to reaffirm their loyalty to that same group?

I felt sick. I’d seen Hookwolf murder someone already. Seen them bleeding and dying on the street. The woman. The guy diving for the cot. The terror. I was breathing too quickly. The fuck had I done. The fuck had I caused. My balaclava was scratchy against my face, I couldn’t breathe. 

I saw a vision of myself, making a choice. I went home, I slept, and I looked through my evidence and found breadcrumbs. While I did it, the Empire moved their prisoners; somewhere that wasn't found in the books they'd know were stolen. I'd put on my costume and I'd go to the ABB and give them some locations, places that were out of the way but important. Maybe I'd even hide some of their money somewhere, and tell them where to look. I'd sit back and watch as Lung fought the Empire, and no fuck-stupid teenager who'd signed on with a gang would get impaled in an alleyway by Hookwolf. And no-one trapped in a basement would get burned.

What had I wanted? To get noticed? To have something under my belt so people would respect me, so that I mattered? So that in _three_ years time I could join the Protectorate, and say, 'remember all that fighting, and collateral, and the two big gangs that broke into twenty small ones? That was me'.

I could really do it. A short, sharp shock, maybe, but one move. No delay. No slow, exhausting, one step in front of another plod towards a finish line that kept moving away from you.

...I wanted so much to forget her face behind the glass. To beat the gangs in one effort, to help the Protectorate mop them up, and fix the city, and have everyone see me as a hero. To _matter_. But this wasn't that. They sure as hell wouldn’t see me that way.

This was bringing a gun to a club. This was biting in the hallway. This was chasing Purity without a mask, a plan, or anything but the hope that it would work out. 

This was leaping, without looking. I was going to get myself killed. Was I trying to? 

The plan wasn’t important anymore. 

"911, what's your emergency?"

"I need to report a kidnapping, multiple kidnappings, by the Empire. Hookwolf and Stormtiger are on scene."

There was a pause. "Connecting you to the Parahuman Response Team."

While it connected, I paced, underneath a hazy street lamp. This was good. This was small. Non-dramatic. That had to mean it was good. Maybe I was a melancholic drunk, and the cold air and the adrenaline had masked it when I'd been investigating. Maybe this was just _right_. Even if I couldn't approach the PRT, after Dauntless, it didn't mean I couldn't call them.

"This is PRT Dispatch, Hannah speaking. What's your emergency?"

Glen had given me a small travel map book, and circled where we'd found the kennels. There was nothing there on the map, so it was hard to describe. "On the 25, halfway around Cannon Hill, there's a compound hidden by the trees. Hookwolf and Stormtiger are there. They’re keeping hostages there. At least one black guy, and a foreign woman, I thi–"

"How did you come by this information, ma'am?"

"I saw them.”

She paused again. "Can you see them now? Are you in danger?"

"No," I said, "I'm safe." I'd wandered across the street, and an elderly asian woman was pushing her stroller in my direction, and the direction of the seafront. She stared at me widely. It was a reminder that I was still in costume, and speaking loudly.

"Ma'am?"

I crossed into the garden of the first house on my road, and stood close to their fence, lowering my voice. I'd missed whatever she'd said before the question. 

"I followed them, then left. They know I was there though. I'm worried they'll move them, or worse. Soon."

"Are you affiliated with the Empire?"

"No," I said.

"Are you a parahuman?"

If I answered honestly it would complicate everything. If I said I was, then they’d ask _who_ I was. I’d be the cape who ran from Battery, who broke Dauntless, who was _vouched_ for by Purity. Being honest would only make them more likely to hesitate and act slowly on my information, to think it was a trap.

"–No."

"I need to ask some standard questions," she said. She launched into a flurry of sharp, pointed enquiries that had me spilling out everything I could remember about the compound. Who I'd seen, how many people, the buildings, weapons. Types of dogs. Even despite all that, it was efficient. It couldn't have taken more than ten minutes.

"Can you attend your local BBPD? A PRT agent would be able to go through what you've seen in more detail, and the more information we have the better we can plan our response."

Plan their response? I'd heard, in the past, that on calling 911 you should lead with the address so that the responders could begin responding while the dispatcher got more information, but planning a response sounded like the opposite of responding.

"Who am I speaking to?" she asked. Unusual, to have taken this long to ask, or was I just overthinking things?

"I need to stay anonymous," I said. "You need to respond tonight, as soon as possible." For all I knew it was too late already.

"Joint PRT and Protectorate actions require careful coordination. The precision of the information we receive makes a big difference. Working with parahumans, we're used to protecting anonymity, would you be able to attend your local police st–" It had the sound of a practiced response. Why wouldn’t it?

The PRT was the emergency service that assessed parahuman threats and responded to those capes they could with their SWAT style officers. For those villains that were too much they called in the Protectorate and backed them up. They were reliant on ‘threat ratings’, categories and numbers that the internet misused sporadically as a ranking system. Parahumans were separated into types based on what their powers did, roughly, and different numbers indicated how many Protectorate capes were needed to deal with them, or something like that, from zero to as many as could be convinced to come from across the entire country.

I had to guess that Hookwolf and Stormtiger needed more than one Protectorate cape, and that was going to make things slow.

"–without reference to any former activities."

I had been scratching at the fence with an idle fingernail, while I was on the phone, and a tiny piece of wood splintered under my fingernail. I hissed.

"I have to go," I said, and hung up. 

They weren’t going to be quick enough. I went through into the backyard of the house, hopped the fence. There was a number I’d programmed into my cell, before I’d left home tonight. 

I hesitated over the dial. This was going to expose me. Three can keep a secret when two are dead, and Faultline had a team of four. A whisper to the wrong ear about the new cape with a lot of money… But this was my choice. This or do nothing, and I couldn’t do nothing. Not while their lives were on the line. 

“—huh. Who’s this?” Her voice was thick. 

“Spitfire, this is Overshadow,” I said. “I need your team’s help, urgently, discreetly, and I’m willing to pay.” 

There were bangs and knocks over the phone, and groaning. She spoke. “Faultline‘s not available urgently, she’s out of town.” 

“I can pay well.” 

There wasn’t an immediate response. 

“Two hundred thousand, upfront, tonight. That sort of well.” There was no price in my head for super powered mercenaries. Was that a lot or insultingly little? 

She was slow to speak. “Err, what do you need doing?”

I explained. 

“That’s a lot…” She went quiet but I didn’t interrupt her. “I’m not actually in charge you know, I’m holding down the fort. I don’t know that I could fight them…”

“Strictly in and out. Smash and grab, smash and rescue. I just– I can’t do it by myself.”

“This is what the police are for. The Protectorate.” 

“They won’t move quickly enough. I tried.” 

“I’ll have to call Faultline, see what she wants to do. I think it’s going to be a no. But they’re going to move them?” 

“Or worse.” 

I could almost _hear_ her chewing her lip. I continued, “If Faultline can do this then we can save them. They don’t deserve whatever the Empire has planned.” 

“Even with the four of us, the Emp—“

“I’ll help,” I said as quickly as I could. 

“How? What can you do?” 

This was the moment. This was the crunch. With _my_ power, the earlier I was known about the more danger I was in – at risk of being nipped in the bud, before I was strong enough to defend myself. Would I have any secrets left by the end of the night? The tumbling in my gut, the constant flashes of the trapped woman’s face against the glass were still stabbing me. I was going to help save those people, and if I had to put more than stolen money on the line to do it– 

“I’m like Dauntless,” I said. “But I can change what my items do.”

“Woah. Can I call you back?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but hung up. 

The fences weren’t much of a challenge, and I slipped over them one after the other with only a little exertion until I was against the wooden planks of Mrs. McCluskey’s garden, the elderly widow who lived two doors down from our house. She was deaf, or very close to it, and it was safe to settle down to wait for Spitfire’s call. 

I fiddled with my phone, spinning it in one hand. Peyton was my only other contact, but he was drunk, and… It wasn’t worth calling him. 

It rang again and I got it on the first dial. 

“Hello?” 

“Overshadow. It’s a no.” 

My heart sank. I didn’t have a plan B. Or, I didn’t want a plan B. Plan B was talking to the Protectorate in person, to convince them, and probably being arrested or interrogated myself, or it was taking them on alone. I’d need my gun back, at least. 

“Was it the money?”

“It’s too little, yeah. Definitely. For this sort of risk. But it doesn’t matter, the job’s not over, she won’t be back in time.” 

I started to swear but she was still speaking. “But, we can maybe still help, she says. Logistics, introductions, and after-care for the hostages if you’re successful.” 

One word stood out to me. “Introductions?” 

“Yeah, we know some people. You called us, so you probably don’t.” 

I hesitated. “I wouldn’t want them to know I was the one paying. I’d want you to say I’m working for the client, or something. Someone else hired on.”

“Sure.”

“I met Thorn tonight, she’s an activist right? I know she’s not into fighting, but maybe she’ll help if we tell her about the dogs. I don’t have her number.” 

I heard fingers clacking at a keyboard. “I’ll ask, but I doubt it. You met Edel today, too, right? She used to be involved in a big way, so maybe. Can you go higher than 200?” She spoke again before I could answer, “Dogs though. I know someone who will care. She’s difficult, really difficult, but she’ll go in hot for this. Yeah, that could work.” Before I could ask, she finished up. “Make your way back here in a mask, I’ll see who we can wrangle on your budget.” 

The tone went dead. Someone who cared about dogs, someone who could fight – it had to be Hellhound, the dog controller. She was a villain. But then, all of Faultline’s team were villains, and I hadn’t hesitated to call them. Whatever Hellhound might be, she wasn’t Empire. And having someone who could control dogs while we rescued the prisoners would be worth every dollar.

Two fences over, I went in the backroom as quietly as I could. Sneaking in after drinking underage was pretty normal, from a certain point of view, and I pulled it off pretty well. 

I used my penlight to get down the steep basement steps. The basement’s door closed loudly at the best of times, so I left it open, but the lightbulb down here buzzed noticeably, too. A bit of a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation. 

Quietly as I could, I slid the boxes open and heaved up the basement slab, pulling it up and back to set down quietly on the floor. So far, so good. On noiseless shadow shoes it was easiest to heft the bag and dash upstairs, resting it on the table in the moonlight. 

Two hundred-thousand dollars went into a grocery bag. Then another fifty, just to be safe. It only took a minute to count it out and stuff it under my shirt, and then I carried it back downstairs. I put the slab back, but didn’t replace the boxes. 

The kitchen door to the backyard closed soundlessly. I didn’t dare lock it again. Fingers crossed there’d be no trouble before Dad woke in a couple of hours, or I got back. 

Halfway back to Mrs. McClusky’s garden, the phone rang. 

“Edel’s on board for thirty. She said no, till I said Thorn had said yes, and then she folded, but she’s gonna be grouchy and maybe a little drunk still. Thorn said yes, when I called her after Edel.”

“That’s good,” I whispered. “How much did Thorn want?” 

“I didn’t offer her anything, and she didn’t ask. I just told her what you told me and that you were going in with or without help.”

Wow. That… That hit something inside me. It was true, technically. But, I’d have to pay her. It would be less messy and uncomfortable if I did. She didn’t deserve to lose out. Probably, she’d be the only one who’d put the money she got to a good cause. 

“Anyone else?” Was it Hellhound, and what had she said? 

“Have you heard of the Undersiders?”

I shook my head, said, “No,” when I realised how stupid that was. “Who are they?” 

“They’re kind of dicks, but they’re not evil. They’re teen villains, thieves. They get in and out, which should serve you well. There’s four of them. Hellhound, Regent, Tattletale and Grue. They’ll do it for a hundred fifty.” 

My insides went cold, for more than the price tag. Grue. Sophia. I didn’t want to work with these guys, not if they were the type of people who could associate with her. 

“Only three of them can make it to the club on short notice.” 

There was an obvious question. “Which three?”

***** *****

I wasn’t asleep, but I wasn’t far from it, leaning against the cold brick wall of Spitfire’s office. There was a tap on the door and I startled.

“Vans are here, and the Undersiders. We can go.” 

I was paying Spitfire a smaller than expected ‘finder’s fee’, and for the money she was transporting all of us there and, _hopefully_ , back. She was dressed in her red and black costume with the gas mask on top, and it slightly muffled her voice. 

“Anyway, here’s this.” She had my gun. She held it out by the barrel and I took the handle, sliding it under the strap of my belt. My current resumed to it with a snap, and things seemed right again. 

“Thank you,” I said. 

“You sure you’re up to this?” she asked. 

“Truthfully, no,” I said. “But this is bigger than me.” 

“Transportation’s ready,” she said. “You better come down and meet them. I’ve told them you're our client’s agent.” 

I was too tired for this, but a shot of worry was as good as a coffee and I was mostly awake by the time we reached the loading dock. 

Thorn was there. She was wearing jeans and a thick puffer coat, and over her head she had a simple white domino mask that extended over her brow and cheek bones, concealing her appearance more than it had any right to. The mask matched Edel’s, but where Thorn was going casual, Edel was in her old costume. 

She looked good. Heroic. It was a white and cream bodysuit, with swooping styled surges in graded colours from the outside in. Her boots and gloves were finned, and edged in gold, and it was super retro, but also very, very professional. Something a Protectorate leader could have worn in the nineties. Something Legend could have. 

Thorn waved at me, and Edel crossed her arms. My attention was already passing to the villains. The Undersiders. 

Spitfire had clued me in more. Tattletale, Regent and Bitch A.K.A. Hellhound were a full time villain team, and they’d pulled off some pretty professional jobs. They kept below the radar, and this job _might_ cost them that. It was why they were demanding so much. 

“So you’re the courier?” She looked my costume up and down. She smiled, just at one corner of her mouth. 

I squirmed awkwardly. She was a blonde girl, about my age, in a purple bodysuit with an eye stylishly worked at an oblique angle across the length of her torso. She wore a simple purple domino mask, and she had stepped forward to form the point of the triangle that she and her two teammates formed. 

“That’s me,” I said. 

Spitfire stepped forward. “And she’s given me the money to hold here, until we’re back. Is that acceptable to everyone?” Her head was laser-focused on Bitch, I noticed. Bad blood? 

There were nods, from everyone except the target of Spitfire’s gaze. Bitch had short brown hair, wore a sleeveless denim jacket, and had a cheap plastic dog mask over her face. She stood back from everyone else, not facing us but holding the leads to three scarred dogs that were utterly disinterested in what was going on around them. Her muscles were obvious from here, and she was a striking counterpoint to her last team mate, a younger guy — younger than me, for sure — with curly black hair, a white mask, and a frilly renaissance shirt. My eyes flicked to him as he yawned. 

“You know who we are then,” said Tattletale, “what do we call you?”

I looked around. They were all looking at me, even Edel and Thorn. I shrugged, “No names necessary. I’m the one, err, directing things on behalf of the boss, so just focus on what you’re doing and don’t worry about me.” 

I heard a tut from one of them, Edel, maybe. Tattletale just laughed. “Bossy it is. We’re happy to do you a solid here. Sounded pretty urgent, and it’s good money, but remember one good turn deserves another in the future, Bossy.” 

My stomach turned a loop. She sounded light and airy, but her words were anything but. Spitfire had clarified that my bill was being discounted from Faultline’s perspective, because they’d value a working relationship with me in the future. A two way relationship. They were mercenaries and that made me uneasy, but the Undersiders were out and out villains. I wasn’t interested in knowing them for longer than tonight.

There was a table off to one side of the club’s garage, and I saw a map of the city and its surrounding countryside, spread open. They’d been planning, of course. 

“So what can you three do?” I asked.

Above her domino mask, Tattletale’s eyebrow rose. “Sorry, no spoilers. Full debrief privileges cost more than you’re paying. No offense, I just try not to share our ins and outs with a vigilante or… a hero? Working with this much cash and a local accent, I’m getting much more of a Blackguard vibe. You know, I was mistaken, I don’t think Bossy does suit you.”

Behind her, Regent offered, “How about Antihero?” I winced behind my mask. 

She smiled wide. “Perfect.” 

There was a roar that echoed loudly off the walls as two vans came down the ramp and span up to the raised platform we were all stood on. They pulled in, one behind the other. The noise was loud enough to make my heart skip.

A tall guy got out the cab. Pierce, from earlier. He nodded at us all, and said loudly, to Spitfire. “We’re all ready. Phone call from the hill, there’s been some activity on their side, but no police and no Protectorate.”

Through her gas mask, Spitfire’s voice wasn’t quite so clear. She nodded. “Time to go everyone. Maybe half an hour to sunrise. Stick to the plan.” 

“What plan?” I asked. 

“On the way,” said Spitfire, but she was already climbing into the cab and there didn’t look to be room for me to follow her. The Undersiders were strolling to the back of the second van, while Edel and Thorn were heading to the back of the first, which was closest to me. I went to follow. Then I noticed that not all the Undersiders were going in the same direction. 

Edel and Thorn had already climbed the step, to sit on the benches on each wall. Tattletale made to climb in after them.

“No,” said Edel. 

“Thought it might be nice to get to know you all better, new faces, do some networking.” 

Edel huffed out a breath. Thorn looked really anxious. Curly black hair and a white porcelain mask appeared from behind the open van door.

“Bitch says there’s no room,” he said laconically, twirling his sceptre in one hand. 

Edel didn’t break eye contact with Tattletale. From the front of the van there was the sound of a hand slapping on the door. Pierce’s rough voice was loud. “Come on. We need to hustle here, people.” Tattletale and Regent climbed in, and I followed. 

Thorn had jumped across to sit next to Edel, and Tattletale took a seat next to Regent opposite them. When I closed the door, I turned to find each side looking at me. The van lurched as we set off, and I fell to the left. Next to Tattletale. I did what I could to make it look intentional. 

“Sorry, just got to make a call,” said Tattletale. On the other side, whoever picked up didn’t have much to say. “The one and only,” she said then, after a pause, “Setting off now. It’ll take us twenty, twenty-five minutes. Eighty percent chance they’ve called more capes to the site, one or two. Plan’s unaltered. See you there.”

I wasn’t the only one who had tensed. “Who was that?” I asked, as she slipped the phone back into a utility belt slung low across her hips. 

“Our long suffering leader, Grue, who will be meeting us there.” 

Something inside me, cold and heavy, dropped down into my boots. “I thought it was you three. I was told it would just be you three.” 

The corner of her mouth turned down. “Not a fan, huh?” 

“I just don’t like complications,” I snapped. 

“Me either,” said Edel. “Four of you, three of us. It’s uneven.” 

“Don’t forget Spitfire,” said Tattletale. 

“Don’t count on her either,” laughed Regent. 

“Not helping, Regent,” said Tattletale. 

Thorn spoke up. She was sat on her hands, her toes pointed together, but she spoke clearly and confidently in her soft accent. “Does it change the plan?” 

“No.” Tattletale leaned forward, taking center stage. “Grue wasn’t close enough to get to the club on our time limit, but we do things as a team or not at all, and this doesn’t change how we’re going to roll them.”

“And ho–”

She held up a hand forestalling me. “For Antihero’s benefit, I’ll go through it again. Two teams, Extraction and Distraction, right? Spitfire will be staying with the vans, protecting our way out. Thorn, we need you to make sure they can’t follow us. Spitfire says you can make sure that their easiest escape isn’t towards the road...”

Thorn nodded violently. 

“Good. The rest of us are going in. The Undersiders are team Distraction. We’ll hide your approach, separate the Empire’s capes, and keep ‘em busy. You’ve got to go fast though, because one of us is going to be letting the dogs out–” 

“Who, who, who, who?” 

“–still not helping, Regent.”

“That’s going to cause as much trouble for us as for them,” said Edel. 

“It’s non-negotiable,” said Tattletale, “and we’ve got Bitch. The bait dogs for sure–” 

“What are bait dogs?” I asked, the title horrifyingly explanatory. Tattletale waved me off. 

“Some of the pit dogs, if we can. While we’re making life complicated, Edel, you and Antihero get in through a wall. Get the prisoners, get back to Thorn, get out. Simple.”

“Simple is good,” said Edel. 

My head nodded. Jerky, like a robot on no battery. I was so tired. Tattletale sat back.

“No use going over it too much, need to save the adrenaline. How ‘bout a getting to know you game? Two facts and a lie, it’s my favourite.” 

“Not interested,” said Edel. 

“Tough crowd,” she said. She turned to me. “How about you, what’s your deal? I’m getting the vibe you’d rather not be working with us four. Gotta’ be there’s someone out there pretty unhappy with you right now.”

I shook my head. “No deal. No comment.” 

She mimed zipping her mouth shut, twisting a key, and throwing it away. “I’m the model of discretion.” 

I barked out a short, sharp laugh. “Are you, _Tattletale_?” 

“Well, you’ve got me there.” She smiled. “But… if there’s some bad blood between you and Grue, we should know before we get there. If it’s going to compromise the job. Grue’s the best of us.” She looked in Regent’s direction briefly. Paused. “He’s the good one.”

He _._ I reeled, underneath my mask. _He_. Grue was a guy. Even a bad costume wouldn’t make Sophia look like a guy. Did that mean, then… Tattletale’s eyes were watching me like a hawk. “Huh,” she said. 

“I think I just need–”

“If someone’s after you–”

“–They will be, after this. You too,” I said. “I just need a minute, before we get there.”

“Point.” She held her hands up. 

I turned towards the back doors, crossed my arms over my knees and rested my forehead there. _Focus_ _Taylor_ , I told myself. There were more immediate concerns right now. 

Tattletale’s voice as she interrogated the others melted into a whirl of burbling sounds, and the roll of tires. I wasn’t awake, but I wasn’t asleep either. Long-quick minutes passed down the river.

There was a crunch as the van pulled off the road onto something less suitable for wheels. We came to a bumpy stop. My back hurt, fragile, as I pulled myself upright.

“We’re here?” I asked. 

“Show-time,” said Tattletale.

***** *****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N:  
> Was tempted with the release of Battle Grounds recently to link Tower of Adamant, which is a really excellent Dresden Files/Worm cross. It takes place post Alexandria’s ‘death’ in Worm. And, err, so I will. If you’ve not read it (you probably have) then you definitely should. Even if you’re not familiar with the other half of the cross, you actually kind of are. DF is a kitchen sink fantasy setting where it’s _all_ real. Fairies, angels, demons, dragons, gods, God, wizards etc. All the stories and myths. Alexandria winds up in Chicago, and all the supernatural creatures aren’t quite sure how to fit her into their framework, and she’s not sure how to fit them into hers. It’s great. 
> 
> Tower of Adamant by Leanansidhe


	16. 2.7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The next part of this action interrupt to the main through line is ‘complete’, so it shouldn’t be a wait of more than a few days. There’s an ending I just need to fully consider if I want to commit to and I’m awaiting some more feedback on it.
> 
> Any and all feedback/Ameripicking or what have you welcome.

**2.7**

***** *****

The air was cold, and crisp. The sort of chill that cut off your breath when you took it in. The sun was rising now, and the sky was a thrill of blushing pinks and deep oranges. If I wasn’t so fucking nervous, it’d have been beautiful. The picturesque swaying of the pines was invisible to me, my mind was fixed on the trouble on the other side. On the people who might already be dead, because of me.

I stamped my feet on the frosty ground, puffed out vapor in the air. Tattletale looked less comfortable than me. Her costume wasn’t going to do anything for her in the coming winter. 

The other van was pulling in behind us, and beyond that there was a beat up old station wagon, still, all the lights off. There was a man in front of it. 

He was a tall guy, arms crossed, dressed in black leathers, and a helmet that had its front cut into the shape of a skull. Boiling darkness curled out into a face which evaporated into the air. Very unsettling. 

“Grue?” 

When he spoke, his voice echoed and thinned, warping strangely like he was farther away than he was. “That’s me. Who are you?” 

“Grue, meet Antihero. Antihero, meet our tough but fair leader, Grue.” 

“Tattletale…” His power stripped away all but the least kind tones of his voice. If he’d intended to sound long-suffering, he came out menacing. 

Spitfire was climbing out of the cab, talking to Edel and Thorn. I was stopped from escaping to them by the opening of the back doors to the van I hadn’t come in. Bitch had climbed in with three ordinary dogs. She came out with monsters. 

Each was different, but none of them looked remotely canine. They were the size of a tiger, made of corded muscle, bone, and shaped like a blind artist’s attempt at a rhinoceros by way of a lizard he’d felt once. They growled like dogs though, and played like them, nipping at each other. Even as I stared, they grew. Second by second, larger and larger. 

“What?” said Bitch, looking like she wanted to hit me. 

“Nothing.” 

I walked towards Spitfire and the Undersiders followed. I could hear Tattletale whispering to Grue. Everyone else was quiet. 

They were all looking at me. Waiting on me, I realised.

“It’s fifty yards up, you can see the gap.” 

“Let’s go,” echoed Grue. We set off.

Bitch’s monster dogs overtook us on the asphalt, keeping just ahead. The Undersiders sat two apiece, except for Bitch, who rode a dog by herself. We crossed the road onto the track that pulled off at a sharp angle, into the trees, and hit the gate. 

It was solid metal, eight feet tall and ten feet wide. Roughshod motors, big, dominated one side, and a complicated keypad device, freestanding, stood off to one side. A camera was conspicuous in one corner, or it was, for a split second. 

Grue moved. The same darkness that spilled from his neck and helmet erupted from his fist, vanishing the camera into a curtain of shadow that didn’t tolerate depth perception. Other than its ragged edges it was completely formless. 

“Jump it?” said Regent.

“Out of my way,” said Edel, from behind. She took wide steps around the dogs, carefully making sure they weren’t at her back. “Alarm will still go off though, so get ready.” She nodded her head at the keypad next to her 

I had an idea. “Let me try something.” 

I put one hand over the keypad, and let my power flicker to it. The current swelled, the power shrinking, layering, crystallising like normal into the device. The connection snapped taut, the very first moments of charge beginning to build. All the lights under the numbers flickered then went out.

All the Undersiders stared at me. I wilted. “Go for it,” I said. 

Edel lit up in soft light. A gentle, washed out, peach color. Like her costume, I realised. It concentrated in her hands then shot out as a bolt and struck the door. I saw the light infuse where it hit, then sink in and spread out to cover the whole gate in a faint aura. 

She pulled out a small box-knife, from somewhere, and drew it from the floor of the gate to the top, jumping to reach. It glided through the metal like scissors through wrapping paper, then the gate door folded back, sagging under its own weight and falling from its supports to drift to the floor like soggy TP. 

Unless the Empire used silent alarms here, that was it. We’d got in, quietly. 

“Ok, go.” 

Bitch growled something, and the dogs took off. Faster than on the street, they raced up the track, up the hill, out of sight behind the trees. I followed Edel over the threshold more calmly, the gate deforming under my sneakers. 

I turned to Thorn. “Stay safe.” 

Spitfire was further back, almost still on the road. 

“We will be fine down here. We will keep the way out open.” Thorn was rubbing at her left arm with her right. “I should do my job,” she said. “Be safe, you two.”

I looked over my shoulder. Edel was waiting for me. I didn’t wait around to see Thorn’s power in action, but took off into the narrow track between the tall trees. Edel set the pace, slower than I’d like. 

“The trees aren’t that deep. Opens into a clearing, rising up to the summit of the hill. Undersiders are probably already there.” 

“Distracting them.” She didn’t alter her pace. We climbed. I think she could feel my nervous energy, my impatience. “Things like this, your stamina won’t last as long as you think it should. The stress, the worry, the adrenaline’s going to take 50% from you.” 

A hundred yards on, the trees thinned and we broke the clearing. “That one likes to talk,” said Edel. 

They were all up by the longhouse. A semi, parked longways, separated the Undersiders from the Empire. I could see cages of dogs, set down by its rear. I could see the Empire. Tattletale was on the back of the most forward dog, and I could see she was arguing with the villains. She had said there might be a cape or two. 

There were five of them. Hookwolf was obvious. He stood forward from the rest, talking to the Undersiders though I couldn’t make out what anyone was saying. Stormtiger, too, was still here.

There was a man I didn’t recognise, wearing a red and black costume: a trench coat or something like a duster, that a cowboy might wear. He was the furthest from me, hidden by the Valkyries, Fenja and Menja. The Empire’s poster girls. These two I knew. They were each eight feet tall, dressed in ridiculous impractical armor, with long blond hair under a closed-face helm, crested with wings on each side. One carried a spear and shield, the other a sword and shield. I knew what they could do. Each could grow as tall as a house, becoming as strong and as durable as a giant. 

This was bad. Outside the city, if the Valkyries gave chase then there was little to stop them. I was sure I wasn’t lucky enough that they’d be slow when they got bigger. Capes in real-life didn’t seem to have those same exploitable pitfalls that they did on Saturday morning TV. 

Talking time was over. Shadow shot out from Grue in all directions suddenly, covering the truck, and half the kennels. Hiding the longhouse from view, hiding the Empire, except for Fenja and Menja. They grew, as quickly as the darkness did, keeping their heads above it, then, for no reason, the one with the spear suddenly jerked, falling into shadow. Her sister ducked down after her. 

I heard nothing. Not barking, not gunshots, nothing. 

“That’s our cue.”

I nodded and rose from the crouch we’d taken at the tree line. “Go right, around the kennels. Swing around the back. The longhouse, at the top, did you see it? They’re in there.” 

“Easy,” she said. 

We jogged over the grass in the dawn light, through the cold air. I could feel it already, the sapping of the adrenaline. The air seemed to take something from me with every breath. Quickly, the Kennel’s furthest wall was between us and the darkness. 

There were two Empire guys there. Young men, with shaved heads, and tattoos on their necks, dressed in camo gear. They’d had the same idea we had, to keep walls between us and whatever was happening on the other side of the dog house. 

Edel fell on one, even as I was registering them, blasting the gun in his hand. Then I had to focus on my own. I surged forward, putting myself behind him as he tried to line up his gun on where I had been. With a flicker, I swapped bands and struck out with the flat of my umbrella, the dull crystalline material hitting him solidly in the knee and taking him off balance. I jabbed him with the point, and called on the power inside it. That faint, _faint_ crackling came again and he jerked onto the floor, flopping like a wet fish. 

I turned to help Edel… And she didn’t need it. She was tying her guy up in his own jacket like a hog. She blasted it with her power, and suddenly it stopped moving in the wind. She gave it a flick and it sounded like she’d flicked granite. He was gagged with his own sock, and his eyes rolled in his head. 

Holding a finger to her lips, she grabbed her guy, and dragged him over to mine, out of sight of the kennel doors. 

“Another guy, in there,” Edel whispered. She looked down at the Nazi I’d taken down, nodded approvingly. Quickly she bound him up in his clothes. I peeked my head around the door. Grue’s shadow had cut off fully three-quarters of the large building. A Nazi was stood with his head half into the darkness, a gun in one hand, and the other holding a gate-rail. The dogs were barking blue-murder, those of them that weren’t caught in the effect. 

“Ok,” Edel whispered, peeking around the corner as well, “looks clear to the back of the cabin. Run, don’t stop. Get behind it as quickly as you can. 1… 2… 3… Go!” 

I swapped my things back into shadow, and crossed the distance in two flickering steps, diving down to where I’d seen the pale lady’s face earlier that night. The back side of the longhouse wasn’t in Grue’s shadow, but it was in the shadow of his shadow, the effect fully hitting the front half of the house, and what looked like most of the inside. The kidnapped woman wasn’t in the two feet closest to the back wall that I could see clearly. 

Pounding footsteps got closer and Edel appeared. She leaned against the timber of the longhouse. 

“Fuck,” she said, panting. “Fuck. You’re fast. I think I’m going to hurl.” 

“Edel,” I whispered, “are you still drunk?!” 

Her torso heaved, but nothing happened. “Of course I”—she paused, continued—“am. Think I’d be here if I wasn’t? It’s been like four hours.” One hand against the wooden wall, she turned her head to me. “So you just break electronics, do you?” 

I shrugged. There was no reason to tell her everything I’d told Spitfire.

She waved her free hand between the two of us. “Not a lot of trust here, is there?” 

I didn’t know what to say. She sighed. 

“Step back.” 

I did. She still looked queasy. 

Edel’s fists began to glow with light, and she flattened her palm against the glass of the small window. A moment later she stuck her fingers through it like taut saran wrap and then pulled it back like taffy. After flattening the edges she went through legs first, and I followed her. 

The shadow cut the room cleanly in two. 

It looked like a still curtain but it gave like pushing your hand into smoke. Most of all, the feel of it was … off. It slithered over my fingers like silk, and there was an oily, greasy sensation to it. It felt like a heavier, thicker form of what I had taken from Shadow Stalker. I grabbed Edel by her forearm and she clasped mine right back. Whatever the similarity, it didn’t help me see any better. 

If anything, it made everything harder. 

I took a step into the shadow and it was like I was walking on a ship at sea, like my feet were pulling through ankle high swamp, and my hip was being pushed by waves breaking on the beach. It was my things – the effect was stronger on them than on me. I swapped bands, letting Battery’s chord resonate instead. There was still that inconsistency in the air, the slight disorientation playing at what my eyes couldn’t see, but it was a lot better. 

“Edel.” My voice sounded hollow and echoey. If she could hear me, I couldn’t hear her reply. I squeezed her arm, she squeezed me back. I just needed to find a door. If I could close it, then hopefully this would evaporate. I’d seen Grue’s power dispersing into the atmosphere outside, and we’d opened the window here. 

Three things hit me in the ankle, and one in the chest, before I found it. I could feel the wood grain, found what felt like a handle. Pushed it shut, felt it clunk into place. 

Walking backwards, keeping Edel behind me, we found our way to the window again, and were able to see. 

“This is pointless,” snapped Edel. “We’re not going to be able to find them this wa–” It all vanished. Thinning into a rapidly lightening haze, I saw the door that I’d pulled wide open instead of shut, clearly visible. This wasn’t because of us. Noise returned, all at once. 

Screams. The crack of a gun. A lot of that deep-bassy sound that you feel through your feet when a thirty foot woman sprints nearby – it turned out it was an instantly comprehensible sound. 

“Go. Go. Go.” I didn’t know who I was shouting it to, mostly myself, because Edel was already moving. 

“Check this floor,” she said, as she rushed through the door to the stairs. I took the basement, as instructed. There were six small rooms here along a thin, rough, half-finished corridor. The walls were constructed from bare breeze blocks, an amateur’s attempt at converting a large basement into a prison. Two of the rooms were completely empty. The rest had recent signs of habitation: Cots with sheets on and the smell of stale sweat. 

Edel was already coming back downstairs, alone.

“They’re not down here,” I said. 

“Must have moved them first.” 

Fuck. It made sense. Dogs were less valuable, less dangerous. Of course they’d move the prisoners first. But that led to the question of why _all_ five capes would still be here, if they’d already secured the most risky cargo. Hookwolf, I could see risking his liberty for their dogs with his bloodthirsty reputation, _maybe_. The others? No way. 

“The semi,” I said. “They’re in the semi. Empire will get off on transporting the ‘animals’ all together.” 

“Do you know that?” And she stressed the ‘know’, like she was asking if it was more than intuition. 

“No,” I admitted, “but it makes sense.” 

Her voice came from low in her throat. “It makes too much fucking sense.” She went back into the room we’d come out of. “Come on.” 

We used a kicked over paint can to climb up and out the window, onto the grass. It was bright now, daylight bright. _Dad’s alarm will be going off soon_. It was such an odd, intrusive thought. Such a small concern in such an intense moment. The normality of it filled me with anxiety. Everything I was doing was unnatural, surreal, but that was concrete. He’d be waking up soon. 

“Focus,” said Edel. I didn’t know how she was holding it together so well when she was _drunk_. Edel peeked around the timber of the longhouse. There was the screech of tearing metal from the other side. _That_ noise brought me back. _That_ noise haunted my dreams. 

The battle was only partially visible. Hookwolf was fighting one of Bitch’s dogs close to the front door of the log cabin, a smaller metal wolf snapping and whirling at the larger monster. A curtain of pure black hung on the grass behind them. As I watched, the cape in the red and black trenchcoat emerged, stumbling onto the grass. The darkness behind him roiled and shot out to engulf him. He didn’t appear again. 

“Semi is right in the middle of all that,” I said. 

“Hookwolf’s busy, just run,” she said. 

This time I didn’t flicker ahead, but kept tight on Edel’s heels. I couldn’t leave her to face him alone if this didn’t work. We sprinted out onto the grass, aiming for where we’d last seen the semi. 

We were almost to the darkness when he saw us. 

“You!” He erupted into sharp barbs and spurs, and for a moment became something entirely indistinct, not a wolf at all. With a wide swipe of the arm he cut deep into the muscle and tendons above the dog’s knee then, as it fell, rammed it hard, sending it spilling back into Grue’s shadow. Metal bubbled and drew inward, until a human figure appeared, the metal soaking into his skin like water into a sponge. 

“You,” he said, more calmly. “It’s really you.” He was walking toward us slowly step by step, and a great smile broke over his face. One that was all teeth. I took a pace back, towards the shadow. 

He shook his head. “You don’t get to leave.” 

I did the only thing I could think of — I turned and with all my strength pushed Edel towards the curtain. She fell backward, head over heels into the abyss. I fell the other way as Hookwolf pounced. In an instant, much quicker than his transformation to human, he turned into a wolf and leapt, great clods of earth ripped out from under his claws. 

I dashed right ten yards and spun to see him land where I had stood a second earlier. He whirled, leapt again, before I could find my bearings. I ran, back in the direction I had come, taking two dashes at a time. I was faster than him on the straight, but only just, his four feet devouring the ground. 

I reached the corner of the longhouse and turned, looking to make a loop and maybe make it back to Grue’s darkness. My heart beat a crazy drumbeat, somewhere high up in my chest. Hookwolf wasn’t going to let me make it there. He didn’t turn to chase me around the building. He tore through, skipping the corner, exploding in front of me in splinters and metal. He spun, silver eyes locking onto me. The noise. The metal scream, it came from his throat, and his teeth, sliding over each other. He towered over me

And I just shook. I shook like a leaf, like a rabbit staring down a cat. He was going to kill me like he’d killed the gangster last week. 

He could still speak. “I’m going to make you hurt.” His teeth were serrated blades, and his fur was a tangle of hooks and thorns on thin filaments. The noise of his every adjustment for his weight was knives and murder. He padded forward on heavy paws. “Make it fun for me. _Scream_.”

And though I was scared, and shaking, and trembling, somewhere deeper inside I thought ‘fuck him and the wolf he rode in on’. I didn’t scream though. When anger got the best of me, I was the type to go quiet. It was cold. I would die if he didn’t. 

I threw my umbrella, and while it flew I drew my gun. There were four bullets in there. He snarled and snapped at my umbrella, to snag it out the air. I shot from the hip, firing the revolver as fast as I could, my hand hovering over the hammer like I could shoot it faster if I looked like a cape in a film. Life wasn’t like Hollywood. Even at ten feet, one missed, and two hit his metallic fur. The last one caught him in the mouth though, on the soft part at the top. A perfect shot. 

It didn’t stop him. It didn’t seem to hurt him any more than the others had. He hadn’t even been distracted. He caught my umbrella like a dog with a stick and with a flick of his head threw it over his shoulder. 

It worked for me. I called it back, so that it struck him from behind before spinning into my hand. It made him look back, but little else. I scrabbled for the fishing line in my belt pouch. 

His big head hit me, his nose struck me in the chest and knocked me to the floor. His teeth caught me by the ankle and then the longhouse and the open field spun up into the sky, turning over themselves before leaping back at me, rushing down to hit me in the face. I bounced. 

Pain came. From my ankle, from all over, too, but almost entirely my ankle. It was a blinding, gnawing pain, a crushing pain, and a burning pain, and cold too. I was bleeding. I groaned loudly, and as the throbs tore through me, I felt my breath hitch and my eyes prick. _No_. _Don’t you fucking dare_. Deep breaths, focusing through the pain, I plucked at my ring. My finger chilled and I got control of myself again. 

Hookwolf was approaching. I heard two heavy feet on the grass, and turned to face him. He was human again. 

“It’s a shame. A fucking shame.” He stood over me, shaking his head. My ankle buckled as I tried to stand, and I stumbled onto my ass again. Very deliberately, he pressed one heavy boot onto my wrist, pinning me. One arm lengthened, turned silver and sharp. A long blade thick enough to run me through. This was it. I had seen this before, again and again in my head, from the moment I had taken his money. I was going to bleed onto the grass, into the soil. Parts of me would end up in the flowers. 

With my ring, there was a detachment to it. A strange one. I had an option, and it didn’t hurt to try, except that it would hurt a lot. 

He pointed the blade over my stomach. “You could have been someone kid, but you tried to fuck me. You made it personal. I don’t give a shit if you’re white, yellow, or fucking blue. Can’t have it.”

I let the band of power in my ring that rang in line with Sophia’s oily, greasy energy flicker and fall away. The other note rang out, flipped my ring over to its dull, crystalline grey. And I grabbed the edge of the blade. I felt it, that faint, hair-raising sensation that signalled metal I could bend, metal I could break. 

I bent it towards the sky. He screamed. And then I pulled him to the ground. There’s a general rule that unless you knew how to fight on the ground, don’t. In Brockton Bay that sort of knowledge was taught in grade school, alongside your alphabet. I didn’t know how to wrestle. Fortunately for me, Hookwolf made the wrong choice. He went full metal.

I caught him with wild punches as he transformed, and I spread him out across the grass like play-doh. I screamed. I screamed for the nightmares he’d given me, for the knife at my throat. Mostly I screamed because my ankle really _fucking_ hurt. A quick swap back helped me stand on my ankle and call my umbrella to me. He was pulling himself back together, flowing back in from the edges. I stabbed my grey umbrella into the thickest part of him, the metal in the middle. 

When I’d used my umbrella in this form I had heard the charge that came out, that crackled, and seen what it could do to normal people. But there had always been that second part, like a fan blowing gently in all directions, that was a mystery to me. Something invisible. With the tip of my umbrella impaled inside Hookwolf, I could feel the difference, what was wind was now water. A wave crashing out. Like the electrical effect, I could only maintain it for a few moments before the power collapsed, but it was enough, I knew what it was for now. 

He tried to pull himself together, and a hammer of magnetism pushed him down. I tried again, activating the umbrella’s power, and blasted him into the longhouse he’d torn through, smashing him through the wreckage. 

I waited a moment, but he didn’t reform, into either man or wolf. 

In front of his broken home, and broken body, it would’ve been a good moment for a line. Something from a film, about how he better not mess with me again, or that I wasn’t afraid of him any more, that I was stronger than him. But he was still dangerous, even beaten. I didn’t know what tricks he’d have found for dealing with someone with magnetic powers like mine. 

My ankle shocked me, when I readjusted my weight. 

I swapped my items back to shadow. I ran before he showed his face, down the hill. Hookwolf was behind me now.

***** *****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Action is a weaker spot of mine. 
> 
> I’ve read a lot since I last posted, and now I’m struggling to remember and recommend what I really ought to. 
> 
> One of my personal favourites just updated recently. I can’t recall if I’ve already recommended it, it’s worth recommending again, in any case. 
> 
> Declaration by Lyrissey is a story about a Taylor who gets her power from some very unusual non-entity entities. It’s really very good, very humours and very horror. There are few fics (basically none) that I can think manage to make the two work together, and in fact, do it so adroitly, making what’s funny one moment pretty damn fridge horror the next. A level of skill to aspire to, for sure.


	17. 2.8

A/N: Here’s the second bit. Don’t despise me, please. Thanks to half-masked, Juff, and Niez. 

**2.8**

***** *****

One tooth had gone through the bottom of my calf and one through the top of my shin. I had been lucky, sort of, that my leg had fallen between Hookwolf’s teeth as much as it possibly could have. I tried not to think about how I was going to hide it, if I got out of this alive. My ring turned the jagged wounds to inky shadow.

I limped as I dashed along on my sneakers, like a butterfly with a wing half cut. Quickly, I reached the border of the shadow covering the center of the compound.

Fenja emerged, stamping and stabbing. She was fast, and I froze, but if she saw me she had bigger things to worry about. A dog followed her, half out of the shadow, and its head darted out to grab her sword between its teeth. However she shook it she couldn’t get it free. The gigantic monster got a moment of purchase on the ground and pulled her back. Back into the shadow. I made sure to go in some distance downhill of where I’d seen them enter. 

The darkness was as before. Cool, disorientating. It pushed at me in waves taller and heavier than I was. I battered through, hard as it was to wade. I wasn’t going to sacrifice my ring’s ability now. 

I either got turned around or the darkness was smaller than I expected. It didn’t take long before I emerged into clean air. A curtain of darkness ran away on my left, and another at an angle on my right, towards the kennels. The majority of the semi was ijust ahead of me, the front and the back cut off by shadow, but nothing else. It was clear. 

I limped forward. The semi shuddered, rocking towards me then settling back onto its wheels. Something big had hit it, in the darkness. Friend or foe? I held my breath... No-one appeared. 

This was crazy. Staying exposed like this would get me killed, flattened by a sword or a spear the size of a building. I hobbled my way to the darkness at what I hoped was the back end. 

I kept my direction with my fingers, feeling my way along the articulation of the lorry. My sense of touch was no different inside Grue’s powers, and quickly, ring burning on my finger, I found a corner. An edge, there was definitely an edge, and a platform. I climbed in and crawled forward on my hands and knees. 

The darkness turned to faint smoke, stopped messing with me, then twilight rapidly became light. There were dogs barking, in cages. Humans hollering, in cages. And an Empire thug, staring at me. I got my umbrella up before he did his gun, and it struck him at full speed, striking into his shoulder. There was a clatter as his gun hit the floor, and he spun into the cages, bouncing off them and landing. 

I called the umbrella back, stood over him, swapped and tazed him. 

“Thank God, thank God.” It was the black man from earlier. He was dressed in a dirty hoodie and stained jeans. He had sneakers on. “You came back. God bless you.” The blonde woman was crying, her hands rubbing over each other continuously, her shoulders hunched. She didn’t look good. None of them looked good. The other two people were black Americans. A younger woman, and an old man, with one eye cloudy and white. They spoke over each in a jumble. 

“It’s OK,” I whispered. “It’s OK.” I swapped my ring to gray, gasped as my ankle flared, and broke the door’s padlock with a pinch. I swapped back the instant the door was loose. They were all of them stooped together in a wire-mesh cage, only four feet tall. I let them out and they stood tall. The foreign woman hugged me before I could do anything. 

“Come on, follow me and stay close. It’s dangerous.” The younger black woman’s eyes flickered to the blood on the floor around my foot, which had dribbled out during the brief power swap. 

We clambered out the back. They were so noisy. Each footstep sounded like a cannon blast, and the older man nearly fell off, before the younger guy caught him. He hooked an arm under the old man’s shoulders and made sure he could keep up with us. 

“What are your names?” 

“I’m Marvin, this is Charles, she’s Donna, and we figure German girl here is Anna, but we’re not one hundred on that.” 

She turned and looked at him when he said it though, so it would do. 

The darkness we had passed through at the back of the truck opened onto clear air. The hill descended to the gate at the bottom of the compound, I knew that much, but I couldn’t see it. There was no one around, and the start of the dirt road to the gate was in sight, before it was cut off by one of Grue’s shadows. Hopefully we could follow it. 

“Everyone hold hands. The darkness makes it hard to keep your bearings.” 

We linked up and plunged in. 

When we came out again we were near the pre-fab office that I’d stolen evidence from. Further up the hill. Damn. 

There were dogs everywhere, like we were caught in the middle of a small-scale migration in the Serengeti. They ran around us in a wave, some slowing to sniff, to change positions at random, running out towards the hill’s summit. Others wheeling around, plunging back into the darkness. 

I wasn’t the only one who flinched. 

“This way. We can get out beyond that water tower.” Grue’s darkness didn’t seem to extend in that direction, locked down in the center of the compound, and it was clear that if I wanted to be able to walk I wasn’t going to be able to pass through his shadow with my ring working. Better to get them out on the other side and walk back along the highway. 

We’d stumbled half way there when the darkness fell. I didn’t notice it; it was Donna squeezing my arm that had me look. The darkness turned to that brief, weird, monochromatic haze and then it lifted all at once and colour returned to the world. What had happened to Grue? 

“Faster.” 

Horror came into view. 

Stormtiger was in the sky, and the Valkyries were back to back in the middle of the clearing. I didn’t see Hookwolf, but I saw the man in the red and black coat. He wore a gas mask, in a different, older style than Spitfire’s. It was Nazi memorabilia. His name was on the tip of my tongue. Krieg. 

Two dogs were harrying Fenja and Menja, but the third wasn’t involved in the fight at all. Bitch and Tattletale were on top, and instead of attacking they were running in my direction. They were chasing after the dogs that had escaped ahead of us. There was no sign of Grue or Regent. But then Stormtiger abruptly jerked and fell, spasming like he’d been hit by Regent’s stungun somehow. 

The pounding of the dog’s feet against the earth was out of time with the Valkyries chasing them. Then the darkness came back, like a thundercloud billowing out of clear sky it spilled from somewhere beyond the shattered longhouse and engulfed the villains like an avalanche. A few seconds later, Krieg emerged. He had been closer to us, and now he was alone. 

The dog skidded to a stop next to me, and Tattletale jumped off, rushing to hook her arm under the old man. Bitch, still riding her dog, had it turn and charge at the Nazi villain. 

“Quickly,” Tattletale urged. 

It was sudden, immediate and noticeable. The dog slowed, its legs working twice as hard but half as quickly. It was suddenly hard to breathe, like two arms squeezing around my chest. It was the same for the others, the prisoners. This was Krieg’s power, the ability to make his blows stronger and everyone else weaker, a kind of spread out telekinesis. 

Bitch and her monster were hit the hardest, whether because they were biggest or because they were closest to him I wasn’t sure. It was like they were trying to charge underwater, and making little progress. Tattletale’s face made it clear what she thought of their chances. 

My line of sight was clear though. 

I threw my umbrella as hard as I could, letting its altered gravity accelerate it towards him (he was walking now, towards Bitch, arms behind his back). It barely made it there, falling at his feet. He stopped, stooped to pick it up, testing the weight of it in his hand. Calling it back didn’t work, he didn’t even seem to notice the pull. 

His accent was heavy, over-rehearsed and affected German. A roleplay, like his costume. “You haf dropped this fräulein, let me return it to your friend.” He threw it overarm, and even with my power trying to resist him it rocketed quicker than I could see.

There was a yelp, though yelp was the wrong word to describe something more like a car alarm next to your ear being stabbed and cutting off. He’d hit Bitch’s dog square in the face, knocking it onto its back. It was tough enough to take it, jumping up and limping away from us. Bitch, though? She stayed on the ground. 

I looked at Tattletale; it was her teammate out cold, and her mouth was set in a grim line. I could tell ‘out of fucks’ when I saw it, her fingers opening and closing over the gun under her belt. 

I almost let her do it. 

“Tattletale, get them to the fence. I’ll get Bitch.” 

“Nice try, Bossy, but you’ve got about as much chance against him as I do, and no skin in the game.” 

I didn’t know her really, and I didn’t much care for her. She was a supervillain, who jabbed, and stole, and burglarized. I didn’t have a handle on her motivations, and I didn’t consider myself a persuasive person. And, of course, two on one was better than one on one, even if her powers didn’t seem very flashy. But the prisoners needed out, and one of us had to do it. 

I grabbed her shoulder and spun her. Giving her a push. Weak as I felt, it was hard enough, making her stumble into the prisoners and bump them into starting down the hill. It was only five feet, but with Krieg’s aura it might as well have been a chasm of fifty. There was a pit in my stomach, and I must have worn it in my shoulders, but she got the message. She led them away, after only the brief shake of her head at me. 

I turned back, like stone grinding over stone. Krieg was close now. Maybe ten steps from me. I tried a dash, but could feel resistance, he was messing with my boots. That wasn’t all, the back of my chest was being squeezed. I was breathing more easily there than on the front of my body, I realised. A sort of tide, the sum of the difference between my back and my front.

“I vill catch them, kinder,” he said, and I could hear the little smile he wore underneath the words. 

He reached me and I couldn’t move. He was so close. There was pepper spray in my belt, but my fingers could only twitch. One backhanded slap to the shoulder sent me rolling a dozen feet. I pushed myself to my feet on arms that felt like they’d just got through a bout of flu. 

I called my umbrella to hand, but even backing away from him it reached me when he did. He swept my leg, then kicked me in the ribs. He hit like a hammer, but even then it was gentler than it could have been. He was toying with me, playing with his food. I came to a stop a few yards from the water tower. Bitch was struggling to pull herself up behind him. At least his attention was firmly directed on me. 

Krieg walked past me, stepping round the metal legs of the tower. He gripped my arm and pulled me around, throwing me to the floor so that I was facing towards Tattletale, and the prisoners. They hadn’t made it as far as I’d like.

“Your efforts haf been for nothing. You must all go in the cells next to them.” He was pulling a handful of small stones from one of his pockets. He threw like a major league pitcher, knee up, arm straight. The air cracked and they fell. The German girl screamed, so high and so shrill that I’d never forget the sound. I could see her convulsing on the ground, then she went as still as the others. There was the rushing ‘ _whoosh, whoosh_ ’ of blood in my ears.

I’d given everything I had, and I’d gotten them killed. I’d tried. I’d tried to get them out. Did it count for nothing? Why couldn’t I— why? 

“Oops,” said Krieg. He turned to look at me at his feet. “Well, we still haf you.” 

I could see his eyes. See the crinkle of laughter.

Hatred like I’d never known. My bullies, so small now, so personal, so unimportant. I’d been afraid of Hookwolf, since the moment I’d first seen him. So afraid that he’d gotten into my dreams. But even that hadn’t filled me up like now. Krieg. I _hated_ Krieg. And I knew it was true hatred because I wanted him dead, I wanted to spit on his body, and there was not even one single part of me that wanted to be the ‘bigger’ person, this time. To be even one tiny scrap of a shred better than him. 

I was on my front, I was on fire, and I tried to crawl away, as fast as a slug. I didn’t call the umbrella. I didn’t want to give him something to wield. My fingertips touched the cold girder that formed the corner leg of the water tower. I pulled myself upright, hand by hand. 

“Fuck you.” 

“You are new to this, yes?” His arms were folded and he watched me turn to face him. I had one elbow crooked around the tower to hold me up, my ring colder than ever on my skin. “We can make this easier on you than the others. It is not too late.”

I could have said something. Told him something. Fuck him. Fuck Nazis. 

I swapped my ring’s power. I only had half a second of clear thinking before the weight on my ankle shot up my spine like lightning and made me spasm. It was enough. I ripped my arm into the metal. Without Krieg’s power, without the tide I’d felt, it wouldn’t have worked. The tower would have been too stable. The leg snapped, I pulled, and gravity did the rest. Krieg ran. He ran in a straight line. With his power slowing it he could’ve gotten out if he’d gone in any other direction. He ran straight. 

The water tank smashed into his head in slow motion, driving him into the ground. There was no tidal wave, not like I expected, and the impact only made me stumble, not fall. A leak was sprung, and a small stream bubbled quickly downhill. Whether he was dead or just unconscious, his power was now off. I didn’t spare him another glance. He didn’t deserve my help. My self-interest in his not being murdered was purely academic. There were more deserving people to help. 

Swapping to shadow, pain vanishing again, I hurried to Bitch. She was up but her eyes were glazed over, looking around in all directions. 

“Bitch. Bitch?” She focused on me, then her gaze slid up over my shoulder and into the air. I clicked my fingers at her. “Focus, Bitch. Tattletale needs you.” 

Bitch growled, and tackled me in a dive. Her shoulder right into my sternum. The ground where we had been standing exploded in a slash of compressed air, the bang rattling my skull. 

“The fuck did you do to Krieg?” 

I rolled twice, three times, in case of another attack, and jumped up. I felt slow now, even without Krieg’s aura. Stormtiger was in the air. His black hair caught in the wind, chain wrapped trousers and thick boots touched down on the sod a good distance away from me. His hands were up in a loose guard, and even from here I could see a distortion in the air around his fingers. He was growing claws again. 

I couldn’t do three fights. 

I was exhausted, bone tired. Bitch whistled, sharply. The nearest dog howled, limping back to us. I put my hand out in the direction I’d last seen my umbrella. Without the hatred Krieg had inspired I had nothing left to give. 

“Walk away. There’s two of us and one of you.”

The voice came from just over my shoulder. “Three, actually. But I can manage you by myself, Stormtiger.” 

He was dressed in red spandex that left little to the imagination, with two white stripes across his shoulders and down his sides to his feet. On his chest, they met in a ‘V’. His eyes were covered by a color tinted visor, the lower half of his face left bare. The fastest man in Brockton Bay: Velocity. A hero.

He was within arm’s reach of me, and from Stormtiger’s jerk, he hadn’t been there before he spoke. I should’ve worried that I was going to be lumped in with the villains, that I was in just as much danger as Stormtiger, but all I felt was relief. It washed through me like cool spring water. 

“The cape girl’s the most injured,” he said, so that only I could hear him. He sounded sped up, like a recorder playing at 2 times speed. “I’ve stabilised them all, as much as I can. We’ll extract the injured, but if you’ve got a way to treat her and get her out of here, you should take it, because if she comes with us she’ll be under arrest.” 

I wasn’t sure why he was telling me all this, but I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. 

Stormtiger, arms out to keep steady, was rising into the air, beyond where Velocity could reach him. 

“Watch out,” I snapped, “he can fire his claws at you.” 

Velocity, hands on his hips, chest out, smiled. “He always goes high when he sees me. Makes him predictable.” 

There was a noise, something that had been in the background, but was getting rapidly louder. Loud enough now that I couldn’t ignore it even in all the chaos. Helicopter blades, the sound of air being chopped into little bits. It rose into view from behind the top of the hill, and quickly dropped down, closer to the ground, swinging around to show us its broadside. 

There was a woman, halfway leaning out. Red, white and blue camo, and a gun, big enough that I could see it from here. Even as the crack of its shot reached my ears, Stormtiger was grunting in shock, all the air driven from him, and from under him. 

He hit the ground hard. 

Velocity was there, securing him, putting a bag over his head, tying him like a hog. “Movers like Stormtiger are tricky to arrest. Less tricky if they can’t see where they’re flying,” he said, next to me. There was only the slightest breeze. It was more like he teleported. 

More cracks of gunfire cut through the air, the helicopter now over the main compound, besides Grue’s darkness. Miss Militia, the shooter, stayed holding onto the door of the helicopter, but two figures jumped out. 

A man in gold and red, with a distinctive helmet in the shape of a Lion roaring. I knew him even if I couldn’t see him clearly. It was Triumph, leader of the local Wards— _former_ leader— and apparently he didn’t need to rappel like the other figure, able to take the fall on his feet. The second hero touched down just after him, her huge sword was held upright in one hand, and her gun was slung from her back, as tall as she was. 

Challenger. 

It wouldn’t take her long. You didn’t win one-on-one fights against Challenger. With Krieg, Stormtiger, and maybe Hookwolf all down—and three Protectorate heroes backing her up, besides—Challenger was going to cut through them like a really big sword through butter. 

I looked around. Velocity was gone. We had a window to get out.

“Bitch, let’s go.” 

She whistled again; her preferred dog was next to her already, and she leaned on it, but now two more followed. Grue sat on one, Edel and Regent on the other. 

They caught up with us as we reached the injured. Velocity hadn’t lied. They were covered in bandages, some in the recovery position. Painkillers and bottles of water were on the ground nearby. Tattletale was the worst of them. There was blood soaking through the bandages on her back. 

Bitch lifted her roughly in a fireman’s carry, then put her over the shoulder of her closest dog. Tattletale hissed through her teeth, she wasn’t out for the count yet. 

“Careful,” I said. Bitch just bared her teeth at me.

“What happened?” asked Grue, the other dogs’ heavy footsteps padding to a stop next to us. Edel’s face was set in a grim line, behind Regent’s shoulder, and Grue’s darkness was boiling off him, leaving a trail that spread out like a speed boat’s wake, cutting off sight of the Protectorate, the water tower, and the Valkyries.

I spun and faced him squarely and he sat up more stiffly, seeing something in my stance.

“What _happened_? What happened to you? You were supposed to be distracting them. Krieg never would have seen us if you hadn’t dropped your cover.” 

“If I hadn’t, your friend would have walked right into Stormtiger and Hookwolf, with no warning.” His power stole any heat, or hurt, or volume from his response. He could have been discussing the weather. 

“Escape now. Debrief later.”

I looked at Edel, but she avoided my eyes as she said it. 

“Are they safe to move?” 

“It was Krieg. It was like he shot them all.” Above us I could hear the blades of the helicopter, fainter now, and circling. Another had joined it, all in red. An air ambulance. Grue had noticed it too. “I don’t know if we can move them,” I said. 

“The Protectorate can get these people to a hospital quickly, get her to a hospital quickly.” 

“Fuck that,” said Bitch. 

I eyed the blood soaking into her bandages. The darkness boiling off Grue got thicker, and quicker. 

“Tats?” he asked, touching her shoulder, I don’t know what he saw in her face. “Fuck. Fine. She comes with us, they stay here. We’ll figure it out, get her to a clinic. Let’s go, we’re taking too long.” 

Bitch jumped up over her monster’s back, securing Tattletale with one hand. “Where are the dogs?” Her nose looked broken, there was blood in her short hair and down her cheek, but she didn’t seem to care, or notice, even though her voice was thick and breathy. 

“They’re free. Let’s go.” 

“Got to get th—“

Grue was still on the ground, and Bitch’s hip was level with his shoulder, but he had reach. He hit her in the stomach and I heard his leather grove creak. 

“Fucking listen to me. Go.” 

She coughed out some sort of reply but slapped a hand on the dog’s shoulder, making it look straight ahead, quieting its snarling. 

With her three dogs bulked up, I hadn’t expected her to take that. She didn’t seem the sort. I was poised, ready to jump in, I realised, but it wasn’t necessary. Grue obviously had a hold over her. I didn’t like the dynamic. 

He jumped up over the other dog. Held a hand out to me. I called for my umbrella and had it smack into my hand, solidly. 

“I’ll run,” I said. In the light I could see my ankle. The darkness, and the little flickering shadows that patched over the wounds that Hookwolf had given me. 

We took off—there was no way the dogs would fit through the hole in the fence so I didn’t mention it—and they hit the border of the compound then followed it round the edges of the trees, back to the entrance we had come in. 

They were fast, faster than me, but with the trees that covered the Empire’s hideout from the road my dashes could let me keep up with them over the uneven ground, and the roots. 

We reached the gate, and saw what Thorn had done. Thousands of points of blue light spilled out into the trees on either side of the track, glimmering in the sunlight, floating in the air from ground level to treetop. 

One of the dogs brushed against them, keeping to the narrow channel Thorn had left in the middle. It yelped, and I saw a splinter of bone and tissue come off like it had brushed against a knife. 

I made sure to keep my distance from the edges. 

On the road outside, the vans were closer to the gate, backed up to the track for us. A wall of Thorn’s thorns had cut off the road ahead of them, the way back into the city, and on the other side I could see PRT vans pulled up, green and white lights spinning. Fuck. 

I came out of a dash at Spitfire’s side, where she was stood on the road, looking out at the city’s response. I couldn’t see how we’d get through. Not all of us. 

Tattletale was being lowered from the back of Bitch’s dog onto the floor of the panel van, on a thin mat that Pierce had set down. Edel jumped into the van without comment, careful not to touch Tattletale, one arm shielding her face from the PRT agents further back along the road. 

“Fix her,” growled Bitch. Message delivered, she guided her dog back to the other Undersiders. 

“Now what?” I asked Spitfire. . 

“Now we leave. They’re not here for us and we both know it. We clear a path, make an escape, and they’ll drive in to support the heroes. 

“That easy?”

She nodded. “What happened in there?” 

I nodded. “They got hurt. Met Velocity, saw an air ambulance circling, thought it was better to leave them there.” 

“Good.” 

The Undersiders were conferring atop their dogs. My eyes flickered to the back of the van. Tattletale was in a neck brace now, with blocks on either side of her head. Pierce had a green bag open next to him and he was hanging a bag of fluid from the roof of the van. He looked at Spitfire, at the Undersiders. He waved a hand in Grue’s direction ‘so-so’. 

The Undersider’s leader pulled out a cell, holding it to his helmet.

The vans’ engines were already on, but now they were revving. Spitfire climbed in the front, but I headed around the back. I wanted to see her. 

“All aboard! Thorn, let’s get the barricade down.” A woman’s hand gave a thumbs up from the front cab of the front van. 

“We’ll open a way through,” said Grue. He put the cell away. Bitch barked something, there was the scrabble of ten-inch claws on asphalt as the dogs ran, and leapt, landing amongst the PRT. Darkness spread to either side of the road. 

I closed the back doors. We were already peeling out, turning in the road.

Edel was sat with her legs crossed at the front divider, pretending she wasn’t wasn’t looking. I couldn’t pull that off, I braced myself against the wall, against the swaying. I stood, awkwardly, over Tattletale and Pierce.

A mask had come from somewhere, strapped over her face with bright green ties. They dug into her cheeks. They were so bright and she was so grey. 

“Is she… Is she going to be ok?” 

Pierce gave me a glance, but I barely noticed. Tattletale’s green eyes had fixed on mine, her head strapped down so that only her eyes could turn. Her pupils were pinpoint small. 

“You’re going to be ok,” he said. 

“I feel sick,” she whispered. 

“That’s normal,” said Pierce. “I’ve got a bag if you need it.” 

The van knocked again and I almost fell. Although my ankle didn’t hurt it almost rolled under me. I looked at it, where the shadows spilled out, looked at Pierce’s first aid kid. 

It took a moment to wrap a bandage above the sneaker, where the wound was. Tight. The moment it was on, I let go of the ring’s power. Pain came back, but my teeth were grit and I was ready. 

“You’re going to be OK,” I said. The ring turned to white gold when I took it off. Gently I put it around Tattletale’s finger. I transformed it where my finger touched it, let it resonate and the shadow inside spill out. 

The pain in my ankle vanished. “Do you feel better?” I asked. 

“Sick.” 

I kept it going, but nothing obvious was happening. 

Pierce put a hand on my shoulder, pulled me back, with a pointed look downwards. There was blood on the van floor, just a little. It wasn’t from my ankle. It seeped out from under Tattletale’s back. 

She was shivering. 

Fuck. It wasn’t working right. My ring didn’t work on her. Pierce pushed me back, gently. 

I sat on the panel next to Edel. My hands found my head. I couldn’t describe what I felt. It had my heart in a vice grip, so strong that it couldn’t beat, and I was shivering as badly as Tattletale. 

This was _my_ fault. I couldn’t stop the tears, the first few racking sobs. 

A hand grabbed my ankle. Her eyes were on my face. 

“It’s OK,” she said. “It’s OK.” 

She was dead before we made it back to the city.

***** *****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To prepare for something I kinda expect. Coil:
> 
> There was no way to have it become clear in the story itself from this Taylor’s perspective. He’s not a big part of this story, either, so it may not ever really be able to be discussed in text. Suffice to say, something happened in the vein of: No Dinah + a compelling opportunity to take a huge swipe at the Empire led him to splitting his chances based around how he influenced the Protectorate response. This outcome was better than the other, for him.


	18. 2.E

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Interlude sorry. It’s an emotional note we end the last one on, and I can’t jump into the next scene for Taylor on that exact same energy. We’ll have to look backwards to see how the Undersiders react to finding out about Tattletale’s death at a later point. Please point out any errors I’ve missed. Thank you to Redcoat_Officer for his help with conceptualising Bet bounty hunting.

**Interlude 2.e**

***** *****

_November 30th, 2010._

_Mesquite, Nevada:_

“We can do the normal filter or decaf.”

The acne-scarred, long-faced, podunk attendant stared at her. One hand rested on the counter, and the other hovered over an archaic cash register. He spoke slow and _did_ slower, like everyone in Nevada. 

Erin flipped one hand through her hair, her bracelets clacking on her wrist. She frowned, but smiled, like she was confused that he had stumbled over his words. Head tilted, she emphasised her long neck, and the collarbone that poked out one side of her couture tee. 

“Um, that actually doesn’t work for me. I’m on a seven day cleanse right now, and I can only drink carrot juice, or water infused with almond bark and essential nutrients.” 

He scratched his chin. The dead skin, literally, fell off and drifted to the counter. Eww. 

“We’ve got bottled water, or tap.” 

“Ok, like, can I speak to your—“ The door swung open, the bell tinkling. Her producer, Steven. 

“Erin. Second crew’s here. Time to go.” 

“Thank God. I couldn’t bear another second in this less than one-horse town.” She turned to the server. “So, just a carrot juice to go, please, thank you, thank you so much.”

***** *****

There were two vans in the forecourt of the gas station now, as well as the pick up truck, and the people carrier for the rest of the team. The station had probably never been so busy.

Each van was filled with cameras, and banks of monitors, that let the show function on location. Despite the raw, in-your-face style of the show the technology needed to make it didn’t come cheap. Erin and her teammates didn’t come cheap. She climbed back into the people-carrier and felt the air conditioning steal the heat from her skin. Heaven. 

Entourage was there, and Bombillate sat with his back to the far wall. Erin fiddled with her seat belt. 

“Paramount wants to speak with you.” 

“I don’t suppose you mean the studio.” 

“Your father,” she replied. 

The clutch that Erin had brought with her was under the chair still and she dug her phone out. No bars. She flashed the screen at Entourage and shrugged. “Guess it’ll have to wait.”

The chair dug into Erin’s stomach as she leaned into the back to grab a bottle of water. The vans behind were slamming the side doors shut. The engines started up. It was a short journey to the border with Utah now, then off the main roads, to their bounty. 

“Tenacity, thanks for getting back to me so quickly.” Entourage wasn’t a very good actress but when she acted as a relay, using her distant clones as a cell, she’d try to affect the accent and it was _the_ creepiest. 

“Ugh, hey ‘Dad’.” She glared at Entourage. Entourage broke character for a second to shrug. 

“Tenacity, honey, how is Nevada, how’s the Old West?”

Tenacity turned to look out the window behind her. Bombillate had one of his serrated knives out and was picking his teeth with it. “Eww, Jerry! Yeah, I’m fine Dad. What do you want?” 

“Is it not enough for a father to want to check in with his only daughter?” 

“Is this your arc? From distant media mogul to doting dad? LOVE that journey for you.” 

Entourage pursed her lips, and it was exactly how her Dad would have looked. It didn’t stop him though. It never did.

“Bloodhound,” ‘he’ said. “He’s back.” 

“If Hotstreak isn’t here, or if he runs, this bounty is going to take a long time. You should call someone else.”

“If he’s not there, then drop it. Uppercrust hired him and didn’t think we’d find out, the pathetic husk tried to hide it from me.” 

Erin didn’t have anything to say. Her eyes caught on the countryside passing by. 

“He’s in the U.S again, Er— Tenacity,” Entourage relayed. “This is my chance. We couldn’t get him overseas, but we can _get_ him now.” 

“Send Bastard Son.” 

“Bastard Son couldn’t do it, it’s his mess. He’s too soft.” 

If they were on her phone she’d have recorded the call and asked him to say it again. He’d never compare her positively to Jonny again. 

She spoke up. “How much are they worth?”

“You want a bounty, you want to make it fit for TV, be my guest. I’ll pay you. Say it’s whatever you’d like, on the show.”

“Dangerous. A blank check, Dad?” 

“That’s not what I’m offering.” Entourage mimed moving and clicking a mouse. “There’s been a bounty posted near New York, not long ago. Some no-name solo cape has killed some assassin type. He’ll be all over a case like that, but it’s a small window, you don’t have long.” Entourage’s strange impression of her dad’s voice broke. “Shield Maiden has entered the office,” she said. There was a moment’s pause. 

“Dad. Please don’t.”

“Honey, I’ve got to go. Bye. Talk soon. Don’t let me down. Bye, bye, bye, bye.”

“So fun talking to you, Dad!” 

“He’s gone,” said Entourage. 

Erin pursed her lips. Bloodhound. She’d never actually been to New York, and Bloodhound was ahead of her. It was the most active cape scene in the country, and that meant it was dangerous by definition. Bloodhound would know the place inside out before she ever stepped foot in the city, and that was worse for her. She remembered how he liked to do things.

Arms folded, her eyes flicked after each passing tree, and electrical pylon. Why hadn’t he just stayed in Europe or Indonesia or wherever he’d crawled to die? 

Of course the Elite would send her to enforce their banishment. Why hadn’t he thought of that? He was so self centered. 

Bombilate was picking his teeth again. 

“That’s disgusting,” she said. 

She breathed out. She started with her fingers, shaking them loose, then her arms, then her shoulders free, an old exercise for nerves from her drama teacher. She breathed in and shook her cheeks loose, relaxing the muscles of her face. “OK. I’m gruff. I’m tough. I’m gruff, I’m tough.” 

Bombilate laughed. 

“Jerry! Go see a dentist.”

***** *****

Erin turned to face the camera. She mussed her hair, and put it into a tight ponytail, then shrugged on her tac vest, and set her tin star medallion at the front. Her shades were thrown to her by a gofer and she put them on to complete the look.

She turned to Flint. “Out of the shot. You’ll confuse the continuity. Bombilate, look serious.” 

Steven counted her in. 

“Ok, America, we’re here at Lost Peak in Utah. Not a lot of people know, but a parahuman bounty that lasts longer than two months has a 75% chance of never being filled, their victims never getting justice. 

“Bombilate ain’t about that, are ya?”

Over Erin’s shoulder, to one side, looking mean, Bombilate stood in his leathers, with his bandana tied below his eyes and his arms crossed. He nodded. 

“Hotstreak doesn’t know it, but his _winning streak_ is about to get scorched. Hope you like the big house, big man, ‘cus you’re going away for a long time. And I got the warrant right here.” Each sentence was punctuated with a jab of the index finger at the camera lens. 

Steven gave her a thumbs up. The cameraman relaxed, the lense tilting to point at the ground. 

“That was great, perfect. Couldn’t be better. Let’s try it again. Drop the winning streak thing, and when you talk about him going away, can you work in something like ‘some like it hot. Not him’, anything like that.” 

“Ugh, Steven. It’s like eighty degrees.” Steven held up two hands. “Is this for the remake? Oh my god, am I in a promo?” 

“Studio might have room for you in a feature, just gotta bump up that profile a little bit.” 

It only took four more tries before there was no thumbs up. The ‘producer’ signal that he wasn’t about to offer a note and ask for another take. 

“Ok,” said Steven, “big van, and the pick up, for the track from here.”

***** *****

On the border between Utah and Nevada, the desert was all Wild West. Steven could see spiny cacti, dead grass, and parched, coarse trees stretched from Mesa to Mesa, across a brown, arid landscape. Lost Peak was a few miles in the distance, and the trail they were on led straight to its summit, overlooking the reservoir far in the distance. That was where Hotstreak had hidden. Where the Fallen had cast him away.

Erin tapped him on the shoulder. She was half a foot taller than him, but he’d been her director for almost four years now, and as much as they complained about each other, he liked to think that beneath all the drama, she depended on him. 

“I am _not_ riding that.” 

A rangy white horse that had seen better days turned its head away from them, disinterestedly. Trucks or bikes would be too loud.

“Just take the reins, Tenacity.” Hotstreak wasn’t in it for the publicity. He wouldn’t try and miss the camera crew.

“Ugh.” Gingerly, she grabbed onto the sticky-out part of the saddle, and he helped her up. The horse flicked an ear at a fly and she shuddered. 

“Here.” Steven handed her a ten gallon hat, and her usual domino tie mask. Today’s was leather, to suit the hat and give her that pre-cape Lone Ranger look. 

“ _Really_?” 

Flint had finished assembling long barreled guns of his own design, half-shotgun, half-rifle, and he fastened them to her saddle. 

“It’ll make some good wide shots. I thought you’d have been a horse girl growing up, for sure.” 

She put the hat on. “Not even a little bit.”

“It’s a straight track from here, down, and then up to the peak and his cabin. Don’t let him hit the drone. Mike check.” 

Erin tapped on the microphone tied to her vest. Dan gave them a thumbs up from inside the van.

“Good luck.” 

She rolled her eyes. Steven slapped the horse on its rump, and it set off at a trot. She had no grace in the saddle, rolling like she was at sea. 

The camera guy had set up a dolly, and he tracked her all the way along her journey. As she approached the lonely peak, the drone went up with the whirr of a hornet. It zipped over to the plateau, and Steven watched them on the monitor. Bombilate was at his shoulder, while Flint pretended not to watch them from the pick up, arms crossed and a baseball cap over his eyes.

“Reservoir reflections are ruining the shot.”

“Can fix it in post,” said the drone operator. He was freelance. Steven tutted. 

“No, go wide, put it behind. Get the desert in the distance.” 

They spun around the peak and the view changed. Erin appeared at the top of the rise, trotting closer to the one cabin that sat at the top. She dismounted from her horse – without stopping it – a little ant-like figure. The horse kept walking. The view swept in, getting closer, looking to get immediate to her serving the warrant. 

“Stay back. Circle like a police chopper.” 

“Boss?” 

“This guy will brick it if he sees it.”

Erin knocked on the door. It opened. The sky turned red in front of them. The image on the monitor lagged behind, then was obliterated in glare. A fire was burning, the largest bonfire he had seen, like the whole mountain was a yankee candle, and the peak was the wick.

“Fuck,” said Bombillate. 

_Fuck_ , thought Steven. 

“Turn the camera off, bring the drone down.” 

“Boss?” he asked faintly. The operator’s tongue was out, his eyebrows furrowed. He was fighting the controls as the image returned.

“Turn the camera off!” He reached over and flicked the big red switch that had to control the camera or the drone. “You!” he said, ignoring the operator’s outrage. “Stop the wide shot, camera off.” The camera-guy’s face was pale but he did as instructed quickly. 

Steven pulled out a first aid kit from the back of the camera van. There was a silvery fire blanket in there and he handed it to Entourage. She walked to the edge of their own plateau, where the track met the edge. There wasn’t much to be said. Bombilate rolled a joint, and lit up. He offered it. Steven declined with a shake of his head. 

“Shouldn’t you guys be doing something?” said the drone operator, gesturing at the capes. Flint looked at him, then pulled his hat lower over his face. Bombilate laughed.

“Tenacity don’t need our help.” He laughed again, throaty from too many years of smoking and drinking. 

“Then why’d you tank my drone?” 

Steven didn’t look at him. There was movement on the trail down from the burning mountain. “Paramount is _very_ strict on Tenacity’s nudity clause.” 

When she came over the range, she was more char than woman. Her hair was burnt to stubble, and fat dribbled like wax over the few patches of skin that were still intact. Entourage covered her in her blanket. 

She gave the team a quick thumbs up, the cracked blackness of her lips drawing back to show a white smile. 

She was dragging Hotstreak by his arm. He looked a lot better than she did, except for the blood that trickled from his temple. His eyes fluttered weakly. 

Erin pointed at a suitcase. Entourage had a pack of wet wipes and was cleaning her scalp, revealing pink skin underneath. One of the camera men pulled the suitcase from the van and brought it over. Inside there were wigs, lots of wigs. She set one in place. 

Entourage held up a mirror, and Erin looked at her new brown curls from different angles.

“Much better.” 

“I thought your hair grew back?” asked Steven. 

“Not for one hit wonders like this schlub.” In her clutch her phone began to ring. If she’d had eyebrows they’d have been raised in surprise, he thought. Erin showed him the cell screen – it was a number he didn’t recognise, and the dialling code was foreign, a low number, European maybe. He opened his mouth. She held up one finger. 

“... Speaking. Who’s this?

“I didn’t expect you to call. Yes, he knows– Yes, he told me– You understand the position you’re putting me in?” 

She giggled. She twirled one strand of brown hair around her finger. “You’re so bad.

“Oh, wow.

“Bye.” 

She put the phone down on top of the suitcase. Entourage hadn’t stopped grooming her, wiping away the damage of her fight with Hotstreak. Tenacity muttered something he couldn’t hear. She wasn’t smiling any more. 

“OK, like, we need to get to the airport right away. We might need to make some phone calls on the way.”

Flint looked up from where he sat on the bed of the pickup. “Where are we going?” 

“There’s a four million dollar bounty in Brockton Bay.” She looked at Steven. “You can go home.” 

Erin picked away a bit of bloody, black nastiness from the corner of her mouth. Her voice was still smoky and rough from the fight. “This is going to be too hot for TV.”

***** *****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N:
> 
> Augment by CCstat is a story about Charlotte, and diverges from canon when Skitter and Tattletale go to the merchant party, post Leviathan. The prose is so quality, the description of Charlotte’s power is so visceral and CCstat never loses sight of her synaesthesia. If you’ve been annoyed with my variating use Taylor’s musical/crystal descriptions of her trump power this is how it should’ve been done properly. This has some of the best third person characterisation of Taylor, Tattletale, Faultline and others that I’ve seen. It ‘feels’ right. I’m really enjoying it (I’m a sucker for Trump powers) so you may too.


	19. Temporize 3.1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The End of Act One, and the last action for a little while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This is 3.1, and the end of Act 1. Temporize will be a little slower paced, without significant action, for a short while. Gotta’ have those brooding, looking out over the ~~dusty plains~~ ocean shots. Thanks to Juff for his help in cleaning it up.

**3.1**

***** *****

My dad. It was a moment of weakness, and I _recognised_ that even as I thought it, but I was so weary, so flat, and so tearlessly sad. I wanted my dad, I wanted him to hug me. I wanted to tell him what had happened to me.

For several steps, I pretended that I could. 

The sun was well up now, though at this time of year the morning was miserable and gray. The Undersiders. I had left them at the drop off point, Spitfire had let us out in an abandoned car lot and I had fled. I hadn’t had to see them react to her body, had only heard their silence as Pierce gave the bad news, bluntly… 

I could never tell my dad, could never lay that responsibility on him. The knowledge would leave him sitting at home, feeling how I felt right now. Why would I do that? 

I was approaching home from the West, on the long stretch that held numbers 119 to 557, letting them shrink down as I got closer to my house. The bandages around my ankle were feeling looser, and would need tending to. The low, oily energy in my ring continued to sing out, hiding the pain, and letting me walk. 

There were cars outside my house. 

The streets of Brockton Bay, on the north side, were narrow. On each side of the street there was a similarly narrow sidewalk – weeds pushing stabbing stalks through the cracks – and then beyond that there were drives as wide as the thin houses that overlooked them; with space for two cars. Each home was separated from the others by a thin path through to the back garden, but there was no green in sight from this side. Six cars parked on the street was an unusual sight, particularly at this time of day on a Friday.

My costume was in the grocery bag I’d used for the money, tucked under my arm, along with my umbrella. I tried to keep my head down as I got closer, looking out the corner of my eyes. It was a mix of sedans and smaller cars.

Forty yards from me, a seventh car pulled up. An SUV. 

I’d seen it before. I’d seen it the night that I had come home with millions of dollars of illegal cash, turning down this street, again and again. 

I’d thought I was too tired, too traumatised to panic. My heart was suddenly in my mouth. My eyes flickered to the windshield of the nearest car, a smaller green foreign model. Two Asian men were sitting in the front, looking out, following me with their heads. 

I turned to the nearest garden. It was far enough from my house that I didn’t know who lived here, but there were no cars on its drive. I tried not to change my pace, to keep my shoulders in the same place. ‘ _I’m just some kid who lives here_ ’. 

Although my ankle was painless, it didn’t work normally. Couldn’t bear weight or let me jump right. It was a struggle to get over the fences, but I managed it. 

By the time I reached the Sullivans’ yard, I was careful to peep down the path, to make sure I wasn’t in the eyeline of the cars. The final fence had me puffing and out of breath, and I levered myself down quietly into our backyard.

The back door was unlocked. Dad was sat at the kitchen table, looking at the front door. The handset for the landline was on the table next to him. 

“Dad.” 

He jumped out of his skin, spinning to face me. “Taylor!” 

I’d never seen his face go from white to red so quickly. It was splotchy, twitching, his hands opening and closing. I didn’t have time for it. 

“We can’t do this now,” I said, and I walked past him through the kitchen door to the hall. The window of the den was too noticeable, so I took the stairs to my room which looked out over the street. Dad was stomping up the stairs behind me. I looked gently through the gap in the blinds. 

“This is capital aitch Horseshit, Taylor.”

“Shh!” I said. I gestured him to the window. 

“What is happening?!” He wasn’t quiet, but he was quieter. 

The SUV was parked on the opposite sidewalk, its doors open. There were a couple of ABB stood on the path to the Jones’s home, trapping the Jones’s family car on the drive. ABB gangsters were all getting out of their own cars, milling on the sidewalk. They’d formed into little groups of three or four, all twenty of them, a little separated from each other. Four stood nearer our house, and two groups were in front of our neighbours’ houses on either side. 

The Jones’ front door opened. It wasn’t Mr. Jones. Oni Lee’s red demon mask was perfectly visible in the light, long white teeth curling out in a horrifying grimace. He was letting his gang in from the inside. 

“I messed up, Dad. I really messed up.” Dad was looking through the blinds next to me. “He’s here for me, Dad.” 

Dad looked at me, looked through the blinds. I saw him swallow. “Okay,” he said, “there’s no time to call the police. We run, out the back.” 

“He can teleport,” I said. 

“We can’t escape in the car. We’ve got to run.” Gently, he reached out and touched my face. One of the bruises from Krieg. “Can you run?” 

I nodded. “Go and grab the Endbringer bag from your room.” 

I ran without waiting to see what he said, and I was in the kitchen when I heard him slamming open his bedroom cupboard. A jump took me down the stairs in the basement, though I knew I’d regret it when I didn’t have the ring. I shoulder barged the boxes to the floor, pulled the slab up, then zipped the bag shut after stuffing my costume in, and heaved it up with a grunt. 

With the straps of the duffle bag around my shoulders like a backpack, I made it upstairs to see Dad looking through the peephole of the front door. 

“They’re taking longer in Tim’s and Helen’s,” he said. “We’re next.” Dad turned to look at me. His eyebrow rose but he didn’t ask the obvious question. I snagged the keys from the keybowl and threw them to him. 

“Lock the door, quietly. We need to go over the back.” Our Garden was fenced on three sides, with a gate in the back corner that led out onto the shared path that joined our street to the street behind. If we went through, it would put us right in the ABB’s line of sight. We had to climb over the back fence, into our neighbour’s garden. Our house would keep us out of sight, as long as we were over before they broke in. 

I tried to climb it by myself, but the bag was too heavy, and my ankle was too injured to get over. I didn’t have the strength in my arms. 

“Dad, kitchen chair,” I hissed. He threw one out to roll across the grass as he closed the back door, and I set it by the fence. Even that wasn’t enough by itself. I sucked in a breath for the coming pain, and transformed my items to Battery’s power source, and got purchase on the wood, sticking to it, toe-forward, like an expert rock climber. 

“Throw the chair into a corner when you’re up,” I whispered, from where I sat astride the fence-top. 

I spun the other way to drop and saw Oni Lee. He was on the rooftop, looking right at me. Someone grabbed me by the bottom of my shirt, then they pulled. I fell, hitting the ground with the bag underneath me, my breath exploding out of me. 

I had the presence of mind to swing my grey umbrella in Oni Lee’s direction, and then there were two of him, one on each side, looming over me. Each held a knife in their right hand. Like Macbeth they stabbed down. 

I opened my umbrella, and they hit the canopy with a scrape like steel on granite. The umbrella proved its worth, and I thrummed the power in it, the one that had worked on Hookwolf. Even with the knives and grenades he was wearing, the force was only strong enough to stagger them, knocking them back a few steps. The knives, though; the knives they had been holding went sailing through the air. 

I jabbed at the one closest and made contact, electricity running through my umbrella spike. The other collapsed to dust as he drew a second knife. 

Oni Lee was on the rooftop. I made a mistake. I swapped back to shadow, to my more familiar powers. On my back, I had no wind up to throw my umbrella so I flicked it at him, and trusted in my power to accelerate it. It was slow, at first, too slow to catch him before he teleported, I realised, and I was defenseless. 

_Fuck_. 

And then, of course, he was standing above me. 

I couldn’t stand, not in any quick way, but I shrugged off the straps so I could dodge. He stabbed at my face and caught my ear; stinging fire. Another of him was standing over my head. He made the same cut as the other Oni Lee and my hands were still in position to catch it. I grabbed his arm and the other one stabbed me in the liver. I gasped as it went in, then my ring burned, fiercely cold, before the pain came. 

I hauled harder than I knew I could, pulling the Oni Lee above my head over me, into the one who had stabbed me as he drew back for another strike. I called my umbrella. 

My eyes flicked towards the fence, the direction I’d thrown it. Dad was there, eyes wide. His boots were pressed against the fence like a novice swimmer about to make his first dive. 

Oni Lee appeared on the fence, knife out. His demonic mask turned down towards my dad.

My umbrella spike hit his head, moving the fastest I had ever seen it. My Dad dived at the Oni Lee I had pulled over myself, as the one who had stabbed me turned to dust. Dad took him to the ground, grabbed the horn of his mask and pulled his head back hard. Oni Lee wore modern plastic armor all over his chest, his stomach, and his shoulders. Dad punched him savagely in the neck. Then he pulled one of Oni Lee’s knives from his belt while the cape choked. Oni Lee turned to dust. 

His body, his real body lay unmoving in our neighbour’s garden. My umbrella was in his skull. 

“Taylor! Taylor! He stabbed you.” My dad was pulling at my top, trying to expose the wound. We had a first aid kit in the Endbringer bag, but liver wounds were big bleeders, I knew that. If it wasn’t for my ring, he would have had to watch me die. 

“It’s OK—” but I couldn’t repeat myself. Too similar to what Lisa had said to me. I pulled my top up, and the skin near the wound was dark, and pale, and shadows moved between the two sides of the puncture like worms. Keeping me intact. 

There was a faint pain in my ankle as my dad pulled me up. Whatever my ring’s limit was, it was close to it. 

“Come on,” Dad said, putting a hand under my arm. His face was pale, and his eyes were fixed on Oni Lee’s body. But it didn’t stop him. Dad pulled me down the path around our neighbour’s house and out onto the next street over from ours. 

I called my umbrella to me, before we left line of sight. Just before. I wiped it against the hem of my jeans. And then I stumbled as we turned the corner. 

“Let me take that bag,” said Dad. I didn’t argue, just shrugged it off and felt fifty pounds lighter. 

“Christ,” said Dad, then put it on how I had carried it. Still, he didn’t let me carry the Endbringer bag. 

We hurried away as quickly as we could, up the street to the next junction. Dad had the veins in his temple bulging by then, and his face was slick with sweat. He hadn’t said a word. 

“I think we should take that truck,” I said. 

“What? No. We should…” he started, looking around, but he had nothing. He nodded at me and set the bag down. I thought _I’d_ do it. Dad broke the door to the house in with two kicks, emerging with car keys a few seconds later. 

We bundled the bags in, then throttled it, throwing the truck into reverse and heading off. I don’t think either of us had a _to_ in mind. Just _away_. 

It was silent. 

“Dad.” 

He grunted. He was half hunched in the driver's seat, looking left and right at every turn-off we passed. This wasn’t the moment I’d have chosen, wasn’t the way I had planned. But hadn’t I wanted this, hadn’t I really wanted it, less than half an hour ago? 

“Dad, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” 

He grunted. Flicked the blinker on and we pulled into a taxi rank, next to the city bank, crawling to a stop. He undid his seatbelt. 

“Taylor,” he said. He turned to look at me, but I could only meet his eyes for a moment, before they were stinging again. A third person had died today, because of me. How could he love a murderer? I had destroyed our futures, destroyed our lives. 

Dad hugged me. For a little while. Then we set out again, towards the Docks.

***** *****

Mom and Dad had met late and got started late, by the standards of their generation. As a kid, they’d taken me to the barbecues, the softball games, and the picnics on the beach with my dad’s co-workers and their families. But I had almost always been the youngest. Most of the dockworker’s kids were significantly older than me. By the time I’d reached twelve or thirteen the other ‘Association children’ were in college or in work.

For Kurt and Lacey, it was the same. They had one daughter, Kacey, who was at state. I didn’t know how they could afford it, there wasn’t much work on the North side of Brockton Bay. 

Dad cranked the handbrake, turned the engine off, and we settled to stillness on their drive. He was straight out, but I was slower to follow. I hung back, by the truck, as he pounded on their door. 

“Dan?” It was Lacey. She was in a dressing gown with a cup of coffee. She’d grown her hair longer since I’d last seen her, months ago, almost to a proper bob. And she’d dyed it bubblegum pink. Round, horn-rimmed glasses, and a face like a hatchet. It suited her. Dad said something I didn’t catch, and she stepped aside. 

“Taylor!” he called. 

I hauled the duffle bag inside with a grunt, Lacey helping me get it over the threshold. I wasn’t going to leave it on show in the truck. We carried it into their den, and I drew the curtains. 

“What’s happening, Taylor,” she asked, “you’re in trouble?” 

“We were attacked at home. Where’s Dad?” 

She pointed to the kitchen. He was standing by the fridge, the wall phone line crossing the kitchen, wrapping around his wrist, pulling at him where he paced. 

“...maybe twenty, and Oni Lee– Yes, I saw him. He was in my home, he stab–” 

“ _Hang up_ ,” I hissed. I waved my hands under my chin in a cross, the universal sign for _‘cut the call, right now’_. He looked at me, turned away, nodded. Nodded again. “ _Dad_ ,” I hissed. He turned his back on me.

I crossed to the wall and hung up for him. 

“Taylor!” 

“We can’t involve the police. We need to handle this ourselves.” 

“Taylor. This isn’t something we can ‘ _handle_ by ourselves’. We need–”

“You don’t understand.” I rushed back into the den. 

Dad followed me. “If it’s Oni Lee”—Lacey’s head spun toward my Dad—“what happened was self-defense. It was justice. They’ll listen, it won’t–” 

I unzipped the duffle bag and heaved it up onto one end. The cash spilled out onto the den floor, more and more as I shook it. 

Lacey gasped, and my dad’s mouth dropped open. I shook the bag in the air. A few final wads of cash, and a little bag of brown drugs, fell to the floor. I dropped the bag. 

Dad sat down on the sofa, like his legs had turned to straw. “What have you done, Taylor?” 

“I stole this from the Empire, last week,” I said, “when they were stealing it from the ABB. I couldn’t let them win.” 

“Lacey...” 

We were all silent. The sea of green stranded us on opposite shores in the den. More money than Dad or Lacey would ever make across their lives. 

“We need to give this to the police. It’s evidence.” 

“Against me.” 

“Dan,” said Lacey. “Dan.” She had kneeled at some point, put her coffee on the windowsill, where it steamed. She turned over one bound bundle of bills. “What are the police going to do with this? They’ve got plenty of evidence against the ABB and the Empire, already. That’s not why they’re still out.” 

“Lacey. Taylor. This is _blood_ money. We keep this, we go to jail, or worse.” I didn’t have anything to say to that. He didn’t twist the knife, his eyebrows narrowed like a thought had just occurred to him. Then he started wading through, kicking the notes to one side, getting onto his knees, pushing cash to one side with big arm movements. “Taylor, you got this over a week ago?” 

I nodded. “Last Wednesday.” 

Dad stood and picked up the empty duffle bag. He shook it. There was a noise, like something was still in there, but there was nothing when he stuck his hand inside. 

“Lacey, have you got some scissors?” 

She was back in a second, and then Dad cut into the lining of the bag. He stuck his hand in, and he came out with an ugly device, some weirdly shaped plastic thing, with wires attaching it to a blocky old cell phone. He pressed the star key on the cell and its screen lit up. 

“A GPS tracker, like Katie used when she was worried about her husband. It sends out a message every fifteen minutes, or every hour.”

I put my hand to my mouth. “The bag was under the basement floor so it had no signal, but I took it out a few hours ago. Took it to the kitchen so I didn’t wake you with the basement light. That’s why they came now.” 

Lacey stomped out the room and came back with a hammer. “Put it down, Dan.”

“Wait!” I looked around the den. “We don’t know if it’s sent from here yet. If it has, and we break it, the trail ends here.” I bit at my lip. “Lacey, do you have a map?”

She did, and when she came back we spread it out over the sofa. I traced the route Dad and I had taken from home to Lacey’s house. “This was our general direction. If we’d carried on, it’d take us out here, towards the North-East, past the lighthouse.”

“Yes,” said Dad, simply. 

“I’ll take the truck, and the bag. I’ll dump them at the first motel along that route, then come back.” 

“Hell you will, Taylor.” 

I expected an argument. He didn’t give me one. Dad picked up the bag, and was out the door in a second. I limped after him to the truck, but he locked the doors the moment he was in, and started it up with a roar. 

I slapped on the windows. “Dad! Take me with you.” He shook his head at me through the window. Put his hand on the glass. Then he reversed out onto the road, and took off. 

“How will you get back?!” I shouted.

I watched him head towards the coast, until he turned and was out of sight. 

If anything happened to him, and I wasn’t there… 

Lacey put a hand on my shoulder. Steered my back inside. Firmly, she set me down on the couch. “Do you want some coffee, or tea? You like tea, don’t you, Taylor?” 

“I’m sorry, Lacey.” 

“We’ll deal with what comes when it comes, OK? Let’s just wait for your Dad.” She drew her dressing gown around herself more tightly, her finger tapping on her coffee cup. “I better call Kurt.”

When she came back, I was still sitting bolt upright on the sofa where she’d left me. She’d gotten me a blanket as well as a cup of tea. In her hand she was holding a free-standing bathroom mirror. 

“Have you seen your ear, honey?” 

I shook my head. 

The top was gone. The arch, on the left ear. I felt at it gently. It was dark shadow, instead of fresh red, and less eye-catching because of it, but the shadow hadn’t taken the shape of my ear. Instead, it was flat like a scar. I pulled my hair forward. 

“You _must_ have questions.” 

Lacey smiled weakly, she looked away. “When you’re ready,” she said. “Get some rest, we’ll wait for Dan. Got to take it one step at a time.”

She went and stood by the window, drawing the curtains slightly ajar and peering out. It was warm, and quiet. My eyes started to close, even as I fought it.

***** *****

I woke to pain in my ribs that sharpened when I breathed in. My ring had deactivated while I slept, I plucked at the power inside it again. Of all my items it could sustain its active power the longest, but it still wasn’t permanent yet. The pain fled.

Dad was next to me.

He was sitting on a white, flimsy kitchen chair he’d pulled round to the den. There was no sign of Lacey. His face was in his hands, fingers over his eyes so that his glasses were pushed onto his forehead. He looked up when I stirred. 

“Hey, Little Owl. I know I said I didn’t want to celebrate this year…” 

It took me a minute. It was Friday. Fuck. It was his birthday. 

“Hell of a forty-fourth,” he said. We lapsed into silence.

“You got rid of it, safe?”

“No problems.” He let his glasses drop into place. “No more talking today, we’re safe, okay? If they knew where we are they’d be here already. You go to sleep, get some rest. That can be my gift this year.” 

I patted him on the knee. “Some gift I am.” He smiled, squeezed my shoulder.

There was still money on the den floor, I realised. I reached down and picked up a brick, placing it in his hand. 

He raised an eyebrow at me.

“Get yourself something nice, kiddo,” I said.

***** *****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hope that was fine.
> 
> I’ve read a few non-worm fics this week, mostly. Got really distracted by a really interesting PJO fic (not often you can say that), but I was reading this one thing earlier in the week: 
> 
> The Great Escape by Colossal Mistake is only on AO3, I believe. It’s a really excellent fic that combines two things I really want to see, at all times. Eidolon perspective and Birdcage breakout. It’s set post Echidna revelations, so no one trusts him, but no one knows about Scion. It’s really exciting, really excellently characterised, and David is the perfect amount of douche (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not). 
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/27459643/chapters/67133911


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